My God, It’s Full of Stars

i.

When she woke it was early, and she was still wearing the clothes she’d chosen for their outing the night before. The lipstick had faded from her mouth, and her necklace was pooled on the bedside table, but her jeans remained crisp and uncrumpled; her T-shirt tucked at the waist. She’d expected him around seven-thirty yesterday evening. Unlike him to be late. But she’d reasoned herself out of panic. A sensible young woman.

Unprecedented for him not to have even telephoned, though. Had she felt jilted? No, she would tell the men. She’d known with sick hot certainty that something was wrong.

Now it was Sunday morning, almost twelve hours since he ought to have picked her up. All night she’d listened for the sound of his engine, his handbrake. But the suburbs were quiet. She lived on a small street that dead-ended in a bulb. He had started teaching her to drive there, explaining about the turning circle while she hugged the edge of the cul-de-sac. If his car had approached, she would have heard it. Instead, only the trains and trams, whose noises carried from streets over, and eventually they’d stopped too and a dreadful silence had settled.

She couldn’t remember having fallen asleep. Now she heard her father moving about, setting the kettle to boil. In a minute, she thought, he would switch on the radio, which he was in the habit of doing every morning at six, heedless of any soul in their modest house who wished for their day to begin otherwise.

And soon she heard it: the ABC’s triumphant theme. From her bedroom, she listened as the announcer soberly chronicled the day’s news. Pope John Paul II would be inaugurated later that day, just seven weeks after the inauguration of the late Pope John Paul I. A US Coast Guard ship had collided with an Argentine collier in Chesapeake Bay, leaving eleven people dead. And, in local news, a young pilot had been reported missing over Bass Strait after departing Moorabbin Airport.

She sprang from the bed so quickly that her vision darkened at its edges. In the carpeted hallway, she lifted the receiver. Her fingers stumbled on the rotary dial. Her face was hot.

A man answered. She realised she didn’t know what she intended to ask.

‘I think I know the pilot who’s disappeared,’ she stammered at last. Her voice came out sounding actressy and juvenile.

There was a pause before the bloke on the other end said, All right, who do you think it is? She was surprised: how easy it was. She’d expected to be treated as a nut; to be condescended to or brushed off.

She said his name. Again she expected to be humoured, but the man said, Can you hold the line for a minute, miss?

She was seventeen but not a child. She worked a job, she wore a ring. She knew what it meant to hold the line.

Her father was in the kitchen doorway watching her. Grave expression at odds with his tartan dressing-gown and sheepskin slippers, and something about that punctured her composure. The receiver was sweat-slick in her grip. She pressed it to her father’s hands.

ii.

She, on land, considering the possibilities, attended the regional office on Tuesday to assist in the investigation, dressed in slacks and a neatly pressed shirt. Limbs composed; an attitude of control, of prudence. Helpful but pragmatic. No earnest smile, no hysterical alarm would cross her face.

When had she last seen him? Friday night, a little past nine, she told them, after he’d finished his shift at the Army Disposals shop. He’d driven to her house, stayed only briefly. He needed an early night. When she’d begun to talk about their plans for the following evening—Saturday—he’d been sheepish. (You boofhead. You forgot, didn’t you. She wasn’t upset. Only teasing him.) He’d arranged a flight to King Island to pick up some crayfish after his afternoon class finished. No matter, she assured him, they could still go out; they’d just leave a little later. Maybe you could take your good duds with you—that way you don’t have to drive all the way back home to change out of your flying clothes. So, seven-thirty? Seven-thirty, they decided; he would pick her up and they would go out, as planned.

Had she felt jilted? No, she would tell the men. She’d known with sick-hot certainty that something was wrong.

Did she know what he had been wearing? Well, then, what did she suppose he might have worn that day? His flying clothes, she told them: brown trousers, a tricoloured brown and white jumper with a thick white strip running the length of each sleeve, and his good-luck coat; a short blue rain jacket which, at a glance, made him look like RAAF personnel (his lucky jacket, he called it). (She was sure there was a photo of him dressed precisely that way—she’d like to find it—already his face was sliding from her memory.)

Had she accompanied him on a flight before? Yes, many times; most often between Moorabbin and Essendon. She considered him a very good pilot. He’d flown to Alice Springs and back. He’d flown this same route, Melbourne to King Island via Cape Otway, though she could not say whether he’d done it at night.

Once, he’d taken her to visit her uncle in Newcastle. They’d flown over solid cloud for almost an hour before they found a hole and descended through it. He was not supposed to fly through cloud, and he had been anxious—she remembered him perspiring, one knee joggling—but certainly not panicked. He was thorough. He planned for contingencies. He was not a man of instinct but of caution. If anything goes wrong, he’d told her once, look for a straight road or a long paddock without fences. (And other things that she could not have explained even if pressed: the swoop of her stomach when they left solid ground, not unpleasant. He had explained inertia. His hand on her knee; his sideways smile. The elevator testing shaft that he’d pointed out to her from the sky—a towering, windowless structure that reached improbably above the flat bayside suburbs.)

Could she recall his plans before his afternoon flight? More or less—he’d had another work shift in Moonee Ponds that morning, finishing at midday, and tutorial classes for his commercial pilot licence at Moorabbin in the afternoon. He would likely have stayed there until his intended departure time (unless—), unless he perhaps drove to the McDonald’s on Nepean Highway: he probably wouldn’t have eaten since breakfast, and he was in the habit of getting takeaway when he had a break between lessons.

What did she suppose he would have ordered? She believed (what did it matter?) two Big Macs, two cheeseburgers, a Filet-O-Fish and some chips, and probably (would this detail help them locate his water-bloated corpse?) a Coca-Cola. He had a terrific appetite but always enjoyed his food slowly. He liked to drive to the beach and sit in his car facing the ocean while he ate. (She pictured him pulled into the carpark at Ricketts Point, or maybe over the orange cliffs at Mentone, the ones painted in oils by Tom Roberts—or was it Arthur Streeton?—watching the water, the gulls, the valiant breaststrokers. He himself was not a swimmer, despite his athleticism; feared the ocean, a little; would avoid flying across bodies of water if possible—was that something she should tell the investigator? It felt relevant, but then again, he had flown that route before—)

He probably would have worn a life jacket on board, she said.

Was she aware that he had departed on the first leg of his journey after 6pm? (Until this moment, no, because the night before he’d said he planned to leave at four o’clock. She couldn’t guess the explanation for this gap in time.) Or that he had told his father that he would be home in Avondale Heights at seven-thirty, the same time he’d said he would pick her up to go out dancing? (No—impossible for her to have known that, surely, since she had not spoken with his father—and how unlike him to make conflicting plans.)

The father had mentioned his son’s interest in UFOs. Was this a subject she knew to fascinate him? No more than the average person, no. They’d seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the cinema a couple of months before, but so had everyone else.

Actually, a few weekends back, they’d been out for a drive in the Dandenongs. He’d said: If a UFO landed in front of me now, I would go in it, but never without you. It wasn’t a serious conversation. In fact, a very small part of that drive. Inconsequential. (The early-spring smell of damp earth and wet gum leaves; the way he accelerated smoothly from tight corners; later, his mouth at her neck, at her collarbone, then her breast—inconsequential—on the radio, ‘Calling All Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, the Carpenters’ cover—was that what had prompted him to mention UFOs? She could no longer remember; only the clean cold air, her shirt rucked up against her back, their bodies pressed together, and she’d wished for him to eclipse her; wished, even as she took him in, that he could somehow contain her, use her up wholly, and right before she came she’d turned her head to the window and saw, for an instant, the night sky clear and startling, dense with stars—inconsequential—and he traced a finger through what he’d spilled across her stomach—never mind that now.)

Did he drink? Sometimes a beer, but never more than two. Drugs? No. Never. Was he in good health? Yes—when she’d seen him the night before he seemed perfectly well, only perhaps a little low in mood after his shift. Certainly not depressed or angry, but not quite his typical cheerful self. (The job was not what he’d hoped for: he’d anticipated something like a managerial role but had wound up a salesclerk, doing stocktake and cleaning floors. Never mind, she’d assured him, it was only temporary; something to tide him over until he obtained his full commercial pilot licence.)

He’d said: If a UFO landed in front of me now, I would go in it, but never without you.

She was thanked for her assistance. Stumbled out into the mild afternoon, onto a city street where people were going about their Tuesday-afternoon business. She was leaden with fatigue. She’d answered so many questions; many of them invasive. But there were things they hadn’t asked about; things men wouldn’t think to ask. There were sentimental details too, which had no relevance to the investigation but carried currency in her own personal archive.

The flare of pride and sorrow she’d felt on seeing his photo in the newspaper. His picture from the RAAF. Handsome in his uniform. His expression, beneath his hat, was serious and attentive, lips slightly parted. The bones of his face so different from hers; clean and angular. You could tell he was a tall man, she thought, long-limbed and athletic, just from his head and shoulders. The same pride she’d had months ago telling the girls at the Night Owl Pharmacy, He’s a pilot. The friendship ring he’d given her a few days before that Sunday drive in the Dandenongs, a week shy of their five-month anniversary. The future they’d invented for themselves: the pilot and his wife, their four beautiful children, a cat, a house by the sea. That he treated her like an adult, like a person to be taken seriously, and not a young girl. The esteem in which her parents held him. They trusted him to take their daughter into the sky and return her safely.

What do I do with these facts? she wanted to ask. Where does the gone go?

iii.

Later, in the investigator’s summary of her interview, the final paragraph:

He had lied to her very soon after their first meeting that he had passed his meteorology subject for his commercial licence, and after four months he had admitted to his lie, and that he was repeating the subject.

It was true. And his father had reported the same thing. Still she felt she’d betrayed him. He was not academically minded, it was true, and yet he was a very competent pilot, and no one had ever questioned his determination. He’d been disappointed to be turned down from the RAAF but not bitter. He volunteered at the squadron headquarters as a civilian until he was eventually offered a position as an airman. It made him firmer in his resolution to become a commercial pilot. That’ll show ’em, he’d told her more than once, but never in a way that suggested resentment.

He sought the help of an Air Force Reservist to help him prepare to resit his CPL examinations. He would spend Sunday afternoons at the squadron leader’s house being tutored in navigation and aircraft performance.

She knew all of this: on a few occasions, she’d even accompanied him to the tutor’s house. He had lied at the beginning, but he was setting things straight now. In September, only a few weeks before he disappeared, he had retaken and passed all five of his exams. He’d telephoned his tutor to share the good news. They’d gone out dancing to celebrate. Champagne, even, though neither of them really liked it.

If anyone doubted her judgement of character, considered her romantic and naïve, they needed only to refer to the descriptions provided to investigators by his flight instructors:

Quiet, sincere, sensible

Sensible pilot

Average pilot

Got on well with all

Didn’t drink

He is quiet on first contact but was quite natural after that

No drink, smoke

Didn’t drink or smoke

No mention of drugs or UFOs

Saw him just prior to departure + he seemed perfectly sober + in good frame of mind

His family understood that he had only one subject to pass before obtaining his commercial pilot licence.

iv.

In fact, of the five examinations he’d applied to resit in September, he’d failed three for the third time. He had neglected to take the final two. She learned this from a newspaper article.

She thought of him the night they’d celebrated. Clinking his glass against hers, laughing when they both grimaced on the first sip. She thought of the way he’d drawn the future, so certain of their place within it. She imagined the terrible loneliness of his lie. The grief of his private failure. A desire to prove himself so great that it swallowed him whole.

The thing was, he had fooled not just her but everyone.

The thing was, his joy had felt so real.

v.

Reporters on the front lawn of their family home in Preston. In the bathroom mirror, she examined her own face: pupils dilated, mouth whitish-grey. The room smelled of sick. Shock, her mother said, and made her drink a cup of strong black tea.

Wasn’t that part over with? Wasn’t she finished being surprised? It seemed to her, curled on her bed, that it was more likely the end of shock: the realisation that the worst had arrived. She had been summoned to discuss him missing, presumed drowned, somewhere in Bass Strait. His Cessna consumed, it was believed, by the ocean. Not a single slick of engine fuel detected, not a finger-length fragment of metal. He had not been spotted bobbing off the coast by the lighthouse, sun-struck and delirious, clinging to a piece of wreckage.

It had been three days. It was over, she thought, the shock and all the rest of it.

Accident site not known. Degree of injury: presumed fatal.

vi.

The pilot obtained a Class Four instrument rating on 11 May 1978 and he was therefore authorised to operate at night in visual meteorological conditions (VMC). On the afternoon of 21 October 1978 he attended the Moorabbin Briefing Office, obtained a meteorological briefing, and, at 1723 hours, submitted a flight plan for a night VMC flight from Melbourne to King Island and return.

The officer remembered him arriving at the briefing office around a quarter past five. They were familiar with each other through the Air Training Corps, though not close friends. He’d said he was planning on picking up a few passengers from King Island, though he hadn’t said how many. He seemed not to know very much about night visual meteorological conditions: he’d asked if scattered stratocumulus at three thousand feet would present a problem. He wasn’t yet sure of his return departure time from King Island but had advised he’d telephone Moorabbin from there to confirm and would also report the number of passengers on board at that time. The officer was under the impression that he planned to return the same evening. They hadn’t discussed lights.

The pilot had taken four life jackets on board.

He’d appeared normal.

The cruising altitude nominated in the flight plan was below 5000 feet, with estimated time intervals of 41 minutes to Cape Otway and 28 minutes from Cape Otway to King Island. The total fuel endurance was shown as 300 minutes. The pilot made no arrangements for aerodrome lighting to be illuminated for his arrival at King Island.

It was possible, the officer said, that the pilot had intended to pick up crayfish. Southern Air Services did not permit crays to be carried in their aircraft. The officer hypothesised that the pilot had used the term ‘passengers’ to refer to the seafood to avoid being reprimanded.

The officer was under the impression that he planned to return the same evening.

The pilot was not carrying a headset when he left the briefing office, headed to the aircraft prior to departure, nor did he carry a bag which might have contained a headset.

The aircraft was refuelled to capacity at 1810 hours and departed Moorabbin at 1819 hours.

The man who had refuelled the plane had filled it to the brim. The jet fuel was locked in a quarantined area, he explained, and he’d used the same tanker to refuel a number of other aircraft that afternoon, so there was no possibility of the wrong fuel having been used, nor of tampering.

The pilot remained in the plane as it was refuelled. It was a Cessna 182L, registration VH-DSJ; blue body with a white stripe on the tail. The mechanic remembered him as a young chap but had not taken much notice otherwise. He was sorry he couldn’t be of more help.

vii.

Sometimes the explanation that made the most sense was that of illusion: a false horizon. It was possible, pilots and aviation experts explained, to become disoriented. As the sun sets, part of the horizon remains bright while the rest becomes darker and darker. This unevenness can make the horizon appear tilted. This can, in turn, cause a pilot to become spatially disorientated, misjudging the attitude of their craft. An aeroplane with its nose pointed downwards quickly gathers speed, following a tightening, funnel-like flight path known as a ‘graveyard spiral’.

viii.

After departure the pilot established two-way radio communications with Melbourne Flight Service Unit (FSU). The pilot reported Cape Otway at 1900 hours and the next transmission received from the aircraft was at 1906 hours.

The rented plane was equipped with a speaker and a handheld microphone. The flight service officer on duty at Tullamarine reported that at precisely 7pm, the pilot had radioed to advise of his anticipated arrival time at King Island. He estimated landing twenty-eight minutes later.

At 1906½ DSJ requested information of any traffic in area since he could see lights.

The pilot didn’t sound panicked, but the officer believed he was genuinely concerned. Melbourne, this is Delta Sierra Juliet. The aircraft has just passed over me at least a thousand feet above. Roger—and it—it is a large aircraft, confirm? Unknown, due to the speed it’s travelling. Is there any air force aircraft in the vicinity? [Open microphone for two seconds] It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game—he’s flying over me two, three times at speeds I could not identify—

The officer asked for his level. The pilot was at 4500 feet. He still could not describe the aircraft. He sounded alert, sincere. He was over open water.

The pilot continued to report lights near him until 1911½ when he reported an engine rough running problem.

Was the unknown aircraft still in sight, the officer asked. It’s ah, nor—[Open microphone for two seconds]—now approaching from the south-west. The engine is—is rough idling. I’ve got it set at twenty-three, twenty-four, and the thing is coughing—

The officer had asked what he intended to do. The pilot said he planned on proceeding to King Island. The aircraft was back, he added. It’s hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it’s not an aircraft—

The officer reported hearing a scraping metallic sound during the seventeen seconds of open microphone that followed. No voices or distinct, identifiable noises.

The alert phase was declared and aerodrome emergency procedures activated at King Island. King Island Flight Service was recalled to duty. At 1912½ radio contact was lost with DSJ.

The officer said: Delta Sierra Juliet. But nothing. He said again: Delta Sierra Juliet Melbourne. It occurred to him that the pilot had reported cruising at 4500 feet, the lowest level that would allow continuous communication with Melbourne Flight Service in this area, and that this may have indicated a loss of altitude.

The distress phase was declared at 1933 with the non-arrival of DSJ at King Island.

Sunset at Cape Otway was at 1850.

Last light at Cape Otway was at 1921.

There was no moon, but Venus should have been visible on a bearing of 225T at an elevation of 25° approximately.

The first search aircraft to depart from King Island reported seeing the beam from the Cape Otway lighthouse with visibility of about sixty nautical miles. The officer’s memory of a calm, starry night was supported by meteorological data and statements from civilian witnesses.

ix.

The investigation assembled a picture of the missing pilot, but also of those around him. She was, variously, his close friend and his girlfriend.

She seemed to enjoy the publicity limelight surrounding his disappearance. She did not appear to be unduly concerned and gave the impression that she expected to see him again. She claimed there was a permanency to her relationship and that they had plans for becoming engaged.

The investigator gained the impression that Valentich had chosen her carefully as someone to discuss his problems with, she being receptive perhaps more so than a girl of 18–20 years, who might have rejected his problems and ideas and pushed him aside.

The impression was gained that she was becoming aware that he was ‘different’ from other male acquaintances and that she was being used as a ‘prop’ based on the odd phrase used and the tone of some of her comments.

x.

Sometimes she wondered if perhaps he had been confused by the lights on his own aircraft, throwing stars onto the placid waves. Was it possible he’d glimpsed his own reflection and—what? Flown headlong into it like a sparrow at a window?

His father told newspapers that he believed UFOs were responsible. A French psychic thought the pilot was in Tasmania. Some believed he’d intentionally vanished in order to start a new life. Others said it was a suicide mission.

What she wanted to know was where all their certainty welled from. She wondered whether she might find it easier to accept the whole thing if she were so firm in her convictions. Sometimes he strolled back into the world. I forgive you, she told him in her dreams. I’m not angry. But I don’t believe in you anymore.

His father told newspapers that he believed UFOs were responsible.

Sometimes, trying to comfort her, people would say, He was doing what he loved most in the world. She could not fault their logic. She only hoped he had felt awe, not terror; had believed, however fatally, that he was hurtling towards stars and not the millpond sea. She could manage, she thought, if his last moments had been filled with wonder, if the night air rushing by had made him think, even for a second, of that night in the Dandenongs: the view of the night sky from up there—Terrific, he’d said, but his eyes were fixed on her; him spent like a struck match, but happy, the two of them still clinging to each other, smell of his cologne and her cigarettes; and outside, ferns stencilled black against the night, satellites winking, stars sprayed across the sky, blazing impossibly, only waiting to be considered useful as a navigational aid.

She knew she had created a romantic fiction. She wasn’t an idiot. Just sick-headed with questions. Imagining what might have happened in that seventeen seconds of open microphone, her brain configured a serene final act.

So not the crumpling of metal, then; not him calling for her or his mother: she pictured the aircraft making contact with the water smoothly, as if landing on tarmac. In her conjuring, everything remained intact and whole. He was unharmed on impact. The fuselage dipped below the waves and did not resurface. Everything was black. He was calm. He knew he could not survive. The end came quickly.

Accident site not known. Degree of injury: presumed fatal. The end of a drawn-out dusk.

In this fantasy she was both a widow and the one who gave him away. His bride the sea, his wife the sky.