The Survivors, стр. 41
Don’t leave me alone with him again.
Kieran checked his phone. No messages and no missed calls. Still, he looked down at Audrey.
‘What do you think, little one? Time to go back? See Mum?’
Audrey’s baby face appeared untroubled either way, so Kieran set off across the sand. He slowed as he passed the entrance to the North Cave.
He’d never liked it as much as the southern one, there were too many twists and turns for his taste. But Finn and Toby had thought it was the better of the pair, and had spent hours mapping out routes. They’d made their mark all over the North Cave, quite literally, and even from the sand Kieran could see a couple of places where the two men had scratched their own names. As he moved forward for a closer look, Audrey decided she’d had enough. Kieran started to sing a little song she sometimes liked but that only made things worse. His daughter scrunched up her face until it was hard and red and began to scream, the sound bouncing off the cave walls and ricocheting down into the warren of hidden tunnels.
‘Okay, all right, we’re going.’ Kieran turned, and then suddenly stopped.
For a second, in the thin slice of silence as his daughter drew breath to scream, Kieran thought he heard a strange whisper of movement.
No. He looked into the dark. Not something moving. Something going still. The frozen watchfulness of an animal. Kieran tried to listen, his palm firm on Audrey’s back. He stared into the black hole. He could hear nothing but her cries and see nothing but blackness, but he had the overwhelming sense of something waiting quietly in the dark.
‘Hello?’
Kieran’s call echoed back to him with a hollow flatness. Sound behaved in an unusual way in the caves, he knew, sometimes drawn deep through the tunnels and sometimes muffled by dead ends and water pools. Now, though, Kieran could see and hear nothing but the two of them. No movement. No answer. Just the gaping black hole.
Still, he felt a prickle of cold that had little to do with the cool ocean air. Above the cliffs, the birds were shrieking again. Kieran turned, strode across the beach and, arm tight around his child, climbed up the cliff path much faster than he had climbed down it.
When Kieran emerged a little breathless at the top of the path, he saw straight away that he and Audrey weren’t alone. He sucked in some air, buying himself a minute. The other person stared back, not happy to see him either.
‘Hi, mate,’ Kieran said, cautiously.
Liam was sitting on the safety rail, his legs dangling over the edge, his broad shoulders hunched and his face turned towards the sea.
‘Were you just down there?’ Liam’s eyes were a little red and watery, but it could simply have been the wind and the glare.
‘Yeah.’
‘No-one’s supposed to go down there.’
‘I know.’
‘The birds are nesting. You’ll scare them. What?’ he snapped, noticing Kieran’s surprise. He turned back, sullen. ‘My dad used to show me the seabirds.’
‘Oh. Well –’ Kieran stepped clear of the unofficial path and back onto the formal lookout. ‘Sorry.’
‘One rule for you, hey?’
‘My baby was …’
Liam looked over.
‘… unsettled,’ Kieran finished, cringing inwardly at his own excuse.
Liam rightly rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the sea. He was sitting close enough to the edge of the rail to make Kieran feel uneasy. The cliff was a notorious suicide spot, if three in twenty-odd years was enough to earn such a reputation.
Kieran looked at Liam now, balanced on the edge, and cleared his throat.
‘You walking back to town?’ he said. ‘I’m going that way.’
Liam gave a weird hollow laugh. ‘I’m not about to jump, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I’m not,’ Kieran lied.
‘It’s not even high tide.’ Liam turned now and this time looked Kieran hard in the eye. ‘That’s the real danger zone, isn’t it?’
Kieran didn’t reply. He made himself remember the boy aged seven, placing a footy scarf on his dad’s coffin. How different would Liam be now if none of that had ever happened, and he’d grown up in the family he should have had? His grandparents – Sean and Toby’s mum and dad – had always been caring in their own quiet, reserved way. They had stuck it out in Evelyn Bay for two years after Toby’s death, battling with the daily reminders of their grief before they’d given in and moved far away to Queensland, settling in a town where the sea water was so warm and flat it was unrecognisable. Kieran knew Sean had thought about joining them for a while but by then he had re-established the diving business and was on the cusp of it turning a profit. Sean’s parents had left with promises to come back every year to visit their son and grandson, but had only managed one difficult tear-stained visit, after which it was mutually decided it was better for all if they didn’t make the trip to Evelyn Bay again. Kieran was still thinking about that when Liam opened his mouth.
‘You got with that chick in the end, hey? That Chinese one who used to live here?’
Caught off guard by the change of topic, Kieran blinked. ‘Mia? She’s half-Singaporean, actually.’
‘Nice,’ Liam said in such a way that made Kieran want to unclip his baby sling, place Audrey carefully down on the grass, stand up and punch the guy full in the face. Instead, he stood completely still and took a breath.
‘I’m walking back,’ he tried again, for a final time. Seven years old. Footy scarf. Coffin. ‘Come with me.’
Liam considered, then to Kieran’s surprise,