Kristy is the one who starts the lake monster myth.
We’re twelve, in our first year of high school, small fish released into a big teeming pond, bumped from the tallest and oldest to the smallest and youngest, all of us tugging at new uniforms that feel as foreign on our skin as the identities we’re tentatively forming.
Kristy has all the makings of being a popular kid. She’s pretty, blonde and slight. Kate Moss heroin chic, complete with guileless wide brown eyes.
And, of course, her dad is Jack Bello.
Jack, with his big farm, his successful meat business and his aw shucks, I’m just a regular guy demeanour. Widower Jack, his fair hair worn long, lines grooved into his face and a cheeky smile.
‘The world lives for a man who does more than the bare minimum,’ my mother likes to say when she’s lucid, because she gets snippy when she’s sober. (Better she be liquored up, better she be high as a kite, better she be an apathetic lump on the couch where the cotton of the cushions fuses to her unwashed skin.)
Kristy has all of these things going for her, and she has, by midyear, without trying, amassed a group of friends, all of the shiny pretty people in the school, though Mum would always say they were no better than us, the only difference is they knocked back whiskey instead of XXXX Gold, fought in quieter voices and used better make-up to cover the bruises.
‘You mark my words,’ she’d say, hungover, and that made her as spiny as a grass tree, just about jumping out of her skin with the need to prick someone. ‘Those uppity bitches have felt the back of a man’s hand too.’
*
Anyway, I remember Kristy, in those days, sitting among her clique, always seeming a little lost. But that was part of her charm—the flightiness, the daydreaming. We love a Manic Pixie Dream Girl until we don’t, until she crosses some unspoken line. Then she’s just weird, then she’s a freak, then she’s annoying and why doesn’t she just shut up? Anyway, Kristy mustn’t have known about this. She didn’t have a mum like mine to tell her to keep her head down and her nose out of shit (even when it’s shit within your own family, even when you’re asking why your dad doesn’t work, why he’s so angry, and can’t you see the finger-shaped bruises on my arms, Mum?). Kristy doesn’t know this, so she goes and opens her mouth and that’s when everything starts, I guess.
No, that’s a lie.
It starts when Annie Dander is found face down floating in the lake.
Before her death, I knew Annie only by sight, and now I know her only in the ways that we inevitably end up knowing dead girls: a projection of our darkest fears, a cautionary tale.
The lake is rock and earth and dam walls on the bottom and seventy-nine metres deep. It’s teeming with tourists and a hotbed of teenage activity. It’s where you drink, you smoke, you fuck and you fuck up. Accidents on the lake, in the lake, nearby the lake are a dime a dozen. John Smith slips on the rocks and cracks his head open, five Jim Beam and colas down. Kerryn Holden chokes on her own vomit five hundred metres from the party she’s attending. A boat capsizes. A swimmer drowns.
But Annie Dander’s been stabbed ten times with a knife.
Our town is small, the kind of small where you notice a new face because you carry a who’s-who map in your head, where you keep an eye on each other not just because it’s a neighbourly thing to do but because everyone else is looking right back and you need your own stash of dirt on people in case they come for you. We aren’t crime-free by any means. This isn’t our first death—husbands beat wives, wives beat children, husbands beat husbands, children beat children. Disputes are solved with fists in a haze of alcohol.
But we aren’t used to a fifteen-year-old girl being murdered.
It changes us. There’s a feeling in the air of unease, questions hang of who, of why. The tension spins goosebumps across our skin. The lake goes quiet, and every day someone whispers a new theory.
Then Kristy comes to school and tells everyone it was the lake monster.
It’s clear she isn’t joking. She speaks with unsettling sincerity. ‘As big as a four-wheel drive, with scaly, crisscrossed skin and claws like tiny knives.’
It was the lake monster, Kristy tells everyone, that punctured Annie’s body over and over again.
She’s met with confusion, amusement, contempt and then annoyance. The more repeated her insistence, the more that people fade away from her, until one day I see her sitting in her usual spot, only this time she is alone.
*
A day doesn’t pass where a part of me doesn’t hurt. My dad came to school drunk once and tried to take another girl home, mistaking her for me. My stomach is as hollow as the promises my mum makes to spend this week’s payment on food and not booze. My front tooth is chipped and my memory of how it happened a blank spot.
So I approach Kristy that day because I can’t afford to be choosy with the friends I make—but also because I know a thing or two about telling stories. My mum isn’t the only one who says things to make herself feel better. I know what it’s like to spin a tale out of self-preservation. If Kristy prefers the reality where a fifteen-year-old is killed by a lake monster to one where she is stabbed over and over with a knife, who am I to judge?
Anyway. Whatever the reason, I go to her side. The most important thing is that I never leave it again.
Funnily, the myth of the lake monster catches on, grows and changes, like a playdough monster touched by too many fingers until the final product is an indistinguishable blob of pokes and prods.
The lake monster only eats virgins.
The lake monster only eats blondes.
The lake monster comes out on Halloween.
Two weeks after Annie Dander is found, Margie Grant at the pharmacy knocks Ellen Holdsworth out in a punch-up after she catches the other girl stealing. Then the next day, Ellen rocks up to the police station with a black eye and split lip and dobs Margie in for selling drugs. Somewhere amid all that, someone says that they saw Margie selling drugs to Annie Dander and that Annie Dander would do anything for a hit and just like that the crime gets lost in the shuffle of town gossip. That’s what drugs’ll do, girls. That’s what you get for spreading your legs for a high, I bet. Be good girls, or you’ll end up like Annie.
*
Kristy becomes like a sister to me, and she and Jack my second family.
When my mum passes out and locks the door with me stuck outside, Jack comes round, picks me up and lets me stay the night. He fishes out pita bread from the freezer, gets tomato paste, tinned pineapple, cheese, capsicum, mushrooms and ham. We make homemade pizzas that crisp in the oven, the overzealous amount of cheese bubbling on the top. We watch The Simpsons on Channel 10, and Kristy lends me her pyjamas to sleep in for the night. They fit, because she is tiny due to genetics, and I am tiny due to malnourishment. In the morning, we have toast and Jack makes us weak coffees, and I feel like I’m on a holiday.
Jack drops me off home, and he has to jimmy the lock open with one of his fish-filleting knives because Mum still hasn’t woken up. But he doesn’t make a big deal out of it and there’s no pity in his eyes, and I’m grateful for that.
‘Jack Bello has a silver tongue,’ Mum tells me later on when she finds out where I’ve been. ‘But he’s got bad bones. You watch out for him.’
‘Bad bones’ is what Mum says about people who’ve got a mean streak, and she uses it a lot—against Dad, the police, and me when her eyes are unfocused and her breath reeks like beer as I’m trying to clean the vomit off her face.
Anyway, she’s wrong about Jack, I think. Because when Dad and Mum get into a screaming match and Dad drives Mum’s head through the cupboard door and I call the police with shaking fingers while Mum howls, blood drips and Dad sits on the floor and cradles an Emu Export, Jack’s the one who races to pick me up in his big old car and whisks me away. Jack’s there whenever my parents aren’t, and he doesn’t get a thing out of it. Just does it out of the goodness of his heart, or because he loves his daughter and Kristy loves me, and how can someone like that have bad bones?
Jack likes to tell stories too, big old tall tales about wrestling cows and climbing mountains, breaking a leg in a motorbike accident in the middle of the outback and surviving five days on his own, and he tries to tell me it’s legit, he’s for real, shows scars on his legs, though I know a bullshitter when I see one. I know a story when it’s spun.
He takes us both down to the lake because Karen Gibson at the local IGA swears up and down that she’s got a photo of the lake monster, snapped it right there on the bank, sold the picture to the local magazine for thirty bucks. Everyone races down to get their own shot because you don’t turn your nose up at thirty bucks around here and Jack gets us in on the fun. I can’t tell if he knows Kristy invented the lake monster story but she doesn’t say anything, so I stay quiet too. It’s a big old turnout and someone flings their car doors open, cranks the tunes and lights a barbecue and we eat hot sausages, no buns, with grimy fingers. People get into the water, even though it’s freezing, and Harrison Grant drops his dacks and moons us from the rocks. It’s not until the next day, when I see the police appeal for information in the local rag, page ten, that I remember it’s the same water that Annie Dander’s body floated in. Page one is Karen’s lake monster photo. It looks pretty fake to me.
*
We get into drinking when we’re in our late teens because there isn’t anything else to do. For once my household is a blessing, filled as it is with bottles of liquor and parents too out of it to notice any of them missing. Jack’s never been a big drinker, and it’s fair play to him because Kristy’s mum was five sheets to the wind when she ploughed their old sedan into the trunk of a big eucalypt and wiped herself off the face of the earth. So when Kristy begs me to get her alcohol from mine it feels like a betrayal to Jack because he tells us all the time not to be getting into that sort of thing—‘It’s bad for you, kills your brain cells.’
I tell my mother, ‘See, this is what a real parent does, this is how they speak’—and she laughs like it’s the funniest joke in the world, and when I tell her to stop being horrible, she just laughs harder.
‘Why do you think she was drinking in the first place?’
Kristy gets floppy when she’s drunk. She has no tolerance, and no awareness of her lack of tolerance, so she will drink and drink and drink until she’s a rag doll slumped against me. I hold her hair back when she vomits and I watch her when she sleeps to check her breathing, because that’s what Jack would do—look after her. Except, what Jack would do would be to not let her drink in the first place, and so I’m all too aware of the ways I’m letting him down, her down, every night that she drinks herself into oblivion.
I’m good at pretending that I’m drinking more than I am, at miming swallows, at tipping alcohol into bushes, onto the ground. I can tell stories with my body, exaggerated movements that speak to a person with no control over their limbs. I can run my words together, slosh them against one another, and speak nonsense until nobody listens to me.
I like it that way; the appearance of harmlessness, the dismissal of the words I speak because of how I speak them.
‘You can get away with a lot when people don’t take you seriously,’ Mum always says. ‘Hiding in plain sight is the only way to hide.’
One night we drink at the lake, and it’s windy enough that the surface is rippling like crazy and people start saying the monster is getting ready to burst out at any moment. Someone says we better throw it a virgin and Bobby Marsh yells there’s no fucking virgins here and Kristy is sitting next to me and laughs the loudest and longest. But I feel sick because she’s a virgin, she must be, because she would’ve told me, like I told her about Milton Haynes, and we spend every moment together and I would know, I just would. Suddenly I don’t want this conversation to continue the way it’s headed so I start talking shit, redirecting everyone, saying something about how the lake monster drinks Jim Beam and the only way to calm it down is an offering of booze. Everyone is ecstatic; Bobby grabs a big old bottle and begins glugging it into the water and everyone is hollering and hooting, and I’m looking at Kristy but she won’t look at me.
It takes a week to hear about more people going to the lake to pour in Jim Beam, holding parties on the rocks just to slosh spirits into the water. My stupid story has been absorbed into the myth, sucked up like sponge, and I feel sick. I look up Annie Dander online and see that the case is still unsolved, but her family has posted on Facebook recently that they’re holding a vigil on Friday to mark the two-year anniversary of her death in the hopes of drumming up interest in her case again. I click ‘Going’ and make a mental note to actually go.
I forget. So do a lot of people, it turns out. Five people show up.
*
In our final year of school, I stay with Jack and Kristy for three months.
My mum leaves in the middle of the night on a Tuesday—takes off with our car and Dad’s credit cards. I’m not surprised, not really, although a part of me wonders why she didn’t go earlier. But she always used to say, ‘Never leave anything to chance, don’t just have one plan, have three,’ so maybe it just took her a while to get everything together to run away.
Her vanishing act is the best thing to ever happen to me.
Jack rescues me from Dad’s raging bender and tells me I can stay for as long as I need. He makes up the spare bedroom for me, but most nights I cram into Kristy’s bed with her and the sound of her light breathing becomes a lullaby that soothes me to sleep.
The summer nights are my favourite. We sit on the patio and look out over the farm, bathed in the scent of citronella candles mingling with the smoke of the barbecue, and the world vibrates with the endless hum of cicadas. The breeze touches the sweat still beading across our skin. Our town is far enough out that light pollution hasn’t obscured the scattering of stars above us. Jack points out different constellations. He loves to talk and he loves to cook.
I try to get him to teach me how to use the barbecue, but he shakes his head and gestures to the scarring across his upper arm from where he once fell against a burning hot griddle when he was twelve. He says we’re too young to learn.
Kristy goes to bed early sometimes, but I’ve always been a night owl—first out of self-preservation and then out of habit. Jack sits up with me and we talk, real late into the night, and he treats me like an adult, a proper one, speaks one on one like we’re equals. He tells me about Kristy’s mum, how she was hard work, but he loved her. Had these moods, these flights of fancy, he called them. How he had to make sure he watched everything she did: what she ate, where she went, how she spent money. How in the end, she just barely left the house, and I remember that—how Kristy’s mum would never leave the car when she picked up her daughter at school, her face just a distorted shadow in the driver’s seat, until one day she stopped coming altogether and Jack was the one at the gates.
‘When a woman becomes invisible,’ my mum used to say, ‘that’s when she needs to be seen the most.’
And I do feel sorry for Kristy’s mum, but mostly I feel sorry for Jack, for how hard it must’ve been. He confides in me that Kristy might be the same way as her mum, and that we’ve got to keep an eye on her, real close, to make sure she doesn’t end up the same way. He takes my hand across the table and tells me he’s glad he’s got me to help and I swell and swell with pride so much I just might float away. I promise Kristy will always have me.
It’s funny, this talk of mothers—I get curious and take a gander at Kristy’s mum’s gravestone a week later and see a funeral in progress across the other side of the cemetery. When I ask later on at school, someone tells me Annie Dander’s mum passed away from cancer and was buried on the weekend, right next to her daughter.
I wonder if I’ll be buried with my old family or my new one.
*
Kristy gets into university, which surprises no one because she has always been quietly bright. Her university is two hours out of town, and Jack helps her snag a little unit near campus, which he’ll pay the rent for. It’s got two bedrooms, and it seems a foregone conclusion that I’ll come to live with her.
I didn’t get into university—or I didn’t try, it doesn’t matter which—but I follow Kristy and get a job at the local club, so I can contribute towards the rent and bills, as much as Jack assures me I don’t need to. Mum always used to say, ‘Nothing ever comes for free, there’s always a catch, everyone’s got a motive so make sure you pay your own way.’ And I don’t think Jack does, not really. But, still, some lessons are absorbed soul deep.
The world of hospitality introduces me to a new little work family, joined in the mutual resentment and trauma of customer service, bonding in quiet moments of taking tequila shots between the influxes of customers. On long nights, I smoke weed in the bathroom with tattooed guys who tell me they’re only working in a club while they finish their arts degree, their script, their novel. I’m alone in my lack of ambition, but I don’t care because my life’s journey is not to climb to new heights but to follow Kristy and ensure she doesn’t fall. I made a promise, after all.
Kristy makes a few friends in her accountancy degree, quiet people with exceptional maths skills, or overconfident guys with fancy cars. The different mix of people—my ragtag hospitality people, her university companions—clash and blend in equal measure in our little home.
But none of them are important.
I know this, and Kristy knows this, because when it comes down to it, it’s just us, really, just the two of us. The best moments are those when I am in the kitchen and I have no night shift ahead of me, so I can cook a meal and quiz Kristy and put on The Simpsons. The only thing that’s missing is Jack’s endless stories, but I try my best to fill the air with my own instead. At night, I stay awake sometimes and find myself wandering through the house, restless, an anxious movement in my veins, in my limbs, that I can’t shake out. I move from room to room, but I linger mostly at Kristy’s, at her door, peek inside, watch her sleep. Sometimes I sit in the hallway, just in case she needs me, and mindlessly scroll social media. Watch a video here, like a status there. One night I come across a tribute to Annie Dander and my body jolts in shock at the name. I accidentally hit the like button. I quickly undo the action. I feel bad about it, and days after when I check again, I see there are only two likes.
*
We visit Jack often, and he still wears his hair long, but it’s shot through with silver now, and his skin is becoming leathery and hardened by a lifetime in the sun. He’s still quick with his stories and his smiles, and mans the barbecue on the patio of his house to cook us dinner when the months are warmer. He’s been putting himself out there a bit, getting involved in the community, even joined the judging panel for the library’s recent contest for kids. The prize is a hundred and fifty dollars for the best picture of the lake monster and Jack tells us they got well over one hundred entries.
Later, Kristy finds the drawings online and picks out the best and says we’re going to get matching lake monster tattoos and she’s laughing like it’s going to be the biggest gag ever. And I laugh along because she does, and because I think of Jim Beam parties and alcohol mixing with lake water and I’m complicit too.
The following day the tattoo artist asks me if I’m handling the pain okay as he’s dragging the needle across my skin. He says I look a bit ill. I tell him it’s not about the pain.
*
Kristy becomes an accountant, and I still work in hospitality, and we move to a bigger unit with a yard. We’ve been talking about getting a pet, a cat or a puppy. Sometimes I think about the future, when we might need places of our own, and my heart hurts. So I try to live in the moments of happiness, like sitting in Jack’s deck chairs and listening to the sizzle of meat in oil with my own little hand-picked family, feeling heady with the smells of summer.
There’s no point dwelling on the past or the future, I figure, when neither exists, not really, not now. And both are so malleable, changeable by perceptions and words and stories. If anyone asks now I can say my mum was kind and sweet, my dad a loving father. Or I can say both died in car crashes. I can even say I never think about my mum or dad, or fists and blood, or twelve-year-old Kristy telling everyone a lake monster murdered Annie Dander. I can say it never crossed my mind to ask Kristy why she made up the story, that it never kept me up at night. That it never made me look at her twice, with a head to one side, out of the corner of my eye, and wonder at the mechanics of a brain that sees a fifteen-year-old’s death as an opportunity to make up a story. I can say I never wondered at a town that preferred a mythic monster to the reality of real ones. There’s even talk of erecting a statue of the monster there, right by the lake, a big old concrete slap with crisscrossed scales carved into the stone.
If anyone asks, I can say that Kristy is my sister. I can tell them that Jake Bello is my dad. I can tell people that Annie Dander was killed by a lake monster. And maybe she was. She was killed by some monster.
As Mum always used to say, ‘If you tell a story enough times, it becomes truth, even when you tell it to yourself.’
