The day Genie disappeared, the smell of the pond scum clung to your nostrils, as if rot itself had found a way in. The night before, we were all around the fire, Genie flirting with Ty. She did that sometimes. She thought I didn’t notice, thought she was subtle, but I knew. A small shift in how she held her torso, raising herself higher. A feigned indifference to the admirer. She was a terrible flirt, Genie. I didn’t usually mind, liked knowing I hadn’t captured her entirely. Couldn’t. A part of her always out of reach. Flirting was her way of claiming herself. Here I am. Me. That night, she was overdoing it, just enough to mess with me. It was only later I realised it was her way of protecting herself. Never getting too close to anyone. She’d warned me they never stayed anywhere for long, she and her dad.
They’d been living next door for 11 months by then.
Genie. Released from her lamp and enchanting us all. It was Genie who made us all eat hangover fairy bread for breakfast. Genie who moonwalked across the arches of Possum Bridge in her gumboots. Genie who wore an oversized tux to our mid-year ball yet shone like Cinderella. She had an angel tattoo on her arm, one she’d etched herself, drunk on vodka in the back of a night club at 14, so she said. Genie, whose laugh I’d pay the devil to hear again, all sparklers and soda fizz and hyena.
She had her father’s black hair, hanging in waves down her back. Her father’s beard was black too. I remember his muscly arms. Saw him chopping firewood sometimes. He’d pause and stare. I’d give him a wave, but he’d just go back to chopping. I put it down to grief—the loss of Genie’s mother. Mum had invited him over a couple of times, but he always declined. Kept to himself. I didn’t go to their place often and usually only if he was out. Genie would say, ‘Dad needs some space,’ or ‘Dad’s got a sore head.’ She preferred my place, or getting out of the house altogether. She was always happiest moving.
We’d gone for a walk earlier that day to the sugar works. I’d been going there as long as I could remember; knew every inch of its junk yard detritus, its weed-covered lakes, the hidden nooks that oozed treacle.
We saw Ty on our way. He was on the lawn out front playing swing ball with one of his younger brothers. The kid had a liquorice strap in his free hand, half eaten, his teeth rinsed in black sugar.
Ty abandoned the game when he saw us and came to the end of the driveway.
‘Whatcha up to?’
‘Just cruising.’
‘Wanna join us?’ said Genie.
‘Ah…’ Ty glanced at me. I knew he’d be thinking he was intruding somehow.
‘Ty!’ said his younger brother.
Ty’s older brother, Curtis, appeared at the door, cigarette in his mouth, glowering at us.
‘Nah, all good,’ said Ty. ‘I’ll see you later, anyway.’
We were meeting later in the day to shoot final scenes for a short film we’d been making. Needed the afternoon light, the long shadows. We’d been messing around with an old Super 8 my uncle had given me.
Genie and I continued to the works, pausing at the usual bend of the bush track, the spot where the factory was visible through a gap in the trees—all Victorian estate and dark secrets. It disappeared as the bush enveloped us once more, white leaf skeletons scattered on the path before us.
The track ended at a bridge—the gateway to the refinery grounds. It landed beside a dam. We watched water tumbling over its edge, dropping four metres to rocks and sand, meeting the tide below. The lip of the dam wall was covered in long slimy moss fronds that clung to the concrete; they gave the water an oily quality, as though it had absorbed syrup from the factory.
The refinery was a jumble of terracotta buildings, all small, blackened windows, steep roofs and chimneys. Steam and thick black smoke rose above storage silos, scaffolding, and ladders. A long metal chute—an insect’s probing leg—stuck out from the factory’s southern end down to the dock.
The closer you got, the more it hit you, smells that competed against one another, like a novice perfumier had yet to perfect the art of blending: the citrusy tang of pine trees, the lakes that looked pretty but stank of rot, the scent of sugar—not white from a crisp clean packet, not the golden sugar that Mum put in her coffee, not even the soft brown sugar we sprinkled on our porridge. It was where we learned how dark, unrefined sugar smells, a giant mound of the stuff.
‘Like molasses,’ Genie had said, the word rolling across her tongue as if she were dipping it in the syrup itself, tasting it between the letters: sweetness and bitterness and iron.
We walked and talked. Genie did most of the talking, her chatter bouncing off the quietly staring bricks, while everything she didn’t say slid silently inside the mortar-filled gaps. She never spoke about her mother. And if I asked why she and her dad had moved so many times, she brushed it off: ‘Thinks he’s a gypsy.’
She stared at the buildings. ‘Sugar and spice, and all things nice,’ she said, ‘that’s what little girls are made of… Wonder what Wonky Willy’s up to.’
I’d told her the old joke about the factory manager, a person we’d never laid eyes on. It was something the neighbourhood dads said. We thought it was a play on Willy Wonka, which I guess it was, though they’d sometimes swap the name for Crooked Bill. Always taking short cuts, so they said.
‘Ty said Curtis and a mate went up the sugar chute a few weeks ago,’ I told her. ‘Said they got into it via the wharf.’
The loading end of the chute was concealed inside a shed-like structure that sat at one end of the dock. A ship arrived every six weeks or so; you could see when one was in port from our living room. It took a few days to offload a vessel, a giant clamshell grab digging deep into the ship’s hold, scooping and releasing load after load. The chute ran up at a steep angle for some 50 metres, the raw sugar carried along its length and into the factory itself, snaking along interior belt conveyors, all the way to the sugar mountain. Least that was how we pictured it. The wharf was deserted between ships.
‘Did they get caught?’
‘Nah. Said there was no one around.’
She stared at the chute while I stared at her: at her diamond nose stud sparkling in the light; the faint freckles you could see only if you were up close; her small and perfect ears, even the one with a nick in its lobe, as if someone had stamped the skin out with a large hole punch. ‘Neighbour’s dog bit it,’ she’d said, the first time she’d caught me staring. But I didn’t believe her. Something in the way she said it.
‘Wonder how cramped it is inside.’
I told her, then, about the time Ty and I had taken turns crawling through one of the old concrete pipes in the junk yard. How Ty had panicked. We must have been about 12. I just thought it was funny story to tell. Didn’t know how she’d seize upon it.
‘So, what, he just froze?’
‘I grabbed his ankles. I mean, they were just asking for it, sticking out the end like that.’ Ty had startled, whacking his head against the concrete. ‘He freaked out. Started bellowing, “Help, help, I’m stuck!”’
Genie was laughing, so I kept going, embellishing the story. ‘Had to meet him halfway from the other end. He was shit scared, eh. All red faced and bawling like a baby.’
‘Poor Ty,’ said Genie.
‘Got him out of there, though, inch by inch.’
‘Fear of tight spaces.’
‘Got any phobias?’
‘Quicksand.’
We continued past the man-made lakes. We called them the poo ponds. A pungent smell would often waft from the water, brownish foam gathered at the edge. More than once we saw a duck’s corpse bobbing upside down in the shallows.
We made our way up past the old workers’ houses and across the field toward the pine forest. There was a scent of hot radish in the air, bright orange flowers crowding a bank, basking in the sun. ‘Nasturtiums,’ Genie informed me.
Their earthy smell was soon overtaken by another. ‘Oh my god, that is vile!’ she said. ‘This place is Charlie’s Chocolate Factory turned rank.’
We’d reached the Gloop Hole. It was some kind of factory waste pit, the size of a Para Pool, with bits of debris sticking up out of the mud—bent steel rope, a gumboot.
‘It’s like everything that ever died is in there.’ Genie wrinkled her nose and picked up a stone she threw into the pit’s centre. It hit the mud with a whump and sank. She went closer, ignoring the “Do Not Enter” sign. She picked up a long dead branch and forced it through the mud, stirring with two hands, like a witch over her cauldron, a sucking and squelching coming from the deep belly of the pit. Then she paused, poking the stick in one spot. ‘What’s that?’
‘Let me see.’ I took the stick from her. ‘Probably just a rock.’ As I drove it around under the mud, I got a sense of something large and oblong.
‘Imagine if it’s an old fridge with a dead body in it,’ said Genie.
‘Or maybe it’s just a big boulder.’
‘No, but it’s the perfect place to hide a body, don’t you think? The mud would just swallow it up.’
‘Are you planning on hiding some dead bodies?’
‘No one would know.’
I told her, then, about the girl who’d gone missing years earlier, Alice Brewerton. ‘They never found her.’
‘Bet she’s buried right there under all that mud.’ Genie stared harder at the pit. ‘Maybe that’s the smell, her rotting corpse!’
‘Nah. It’s just something dumped from the factory.’
‘Maybe the mud stops her body from properly decomposing, so she’s half rotting and not rotting!’ Genie looked both appalled and enthralled.
I pictured Alice’s face. For a long time there was a faded poster of her stuck to the window of the local Fish ‘n’ Chip shop, amongst the “Missing Pet” and “For Sale” notices. She had curly blonde hair and sparkly eyes. I told Genie about the poster.
‘Imagine ending up here, stuck in stinking, ponging muck.’ She stared at the mud as though Alice Brewerton were about to rise from its depths.
We left the pit and headed through the forest, coming full circle to the clifftop that sat opposite the factory and above the dam. The trees thinned out here, tall sentries keeping watch over all that sweet sugar.
Genie draped herself back against a tree that was on a lean, beckoning me to her. I’ve never experienced kissing the way I did with Genie, not before, not since. They say octopuses have brain tissue in every arm, every sucker, each operating independently. Our lips were the same—every tiny nerve, every crease taking its time in exploration. Genie would moan and sigh, then tease me with the tip of her tongue. I longed to lie her down upon the rust-coloured carpet of pine needles. ‘Soon,’ she’d said a few days earlier. ‘When we’ve been together a year.’
We sat side by side between the trees, dreamy from pashing.
‘It smells like Christmas in here,’ she said.
‘Do you miss your mum at Christmas?’ It just slipped out. I’d never pressed her about her mum before. ‘Sorry, I just—’
‘I dropped her favourite decoration last Christmas.’
I looked at her face.
‘It smashed into all these tiny pieces.’ Her voice had grown soft, still I heard the prickles within it.
‘Glass?’
She nodded. ‘It was an egg shape, and it had this miniature picture painted on it of Santa’s sleigh flying over a house in the snow.’
‘Yeah, we’ve got some like th—’
‘I didn’t know glass could be so thin,’ she said. Then she lay back and stared up at the canopy of needles and cone-laden boughs. We watched the light caught in spiders’ threads, and birds’ silhouettes flitting above us, a linocut in motion. I imagined her picking up the shards of the decoration she’d described—tiny, rounded jigsaw pieces she had no hope of re-assembling. I would have lain beside her all afternoon, listening to the wind in the trees, the distant quack of a duck, the groaning of old tree trunks. But Genie was never still for long. She leapt up then. ‘Race you to the warehouse.’
The warehouse was right across the other side of the factory grounds. I chased her out of the forest and around the lakes, until we were heading up through bush to an abandoned horse paddock, and on through scrubby old macrocarpa trees. It was my secret way to the out-of-bounds back of the warehouse, one I’d discovered as a kid, instantly claiming ownership as only kids can, the kind you remain loyal to years later—the rock that must be bounded over, the elbow-tree that must be swung from. Genie got it straight away the first time I took her there. There were simpler routes to the warehouse, but we always went that way.
The trees ended at a steep bank, slippery with dry clay and struggling gorse, the warehouse directly opposite. It was almost all roof, one great sloping pyramid of corrugated iron. We slid down the bank, landing beside the building’s concrete brick base. Genie looked up through the vent of wire mesh under the overhang of the giant roof, where we could see the dark shadow of the sugar mountain. Bees buzzed around the vent. There were bees’ bodies too, trembling in the breeze, old and papery, trapped on the mesh. The vent was gluggy in places with congealed sugar syrup.
‘Give us a foot up?’
Genie stretched up on my knee. There wasn’t a lot you could get your fingers on, but the small taste was all the more enticing for it, like the last scraping from an icing bowl. She sucked on her finger and closed her eyes. ‘Stolen toffee,’ she said.
It was quiet in that spot, the narrow path between the high bank and the building a vacuum that muffled the sound of the wider world. Your senses were more fully attuned: to the heat, the humming of bees, the scratchy feel of fingers on the old, lichen-covered concrete, and the smell—there was none of the stench here, just the fresh scent of pine resin and the richness of molasses.
We walked along the side of the warehouse to the high wire fence that stopped intruders from the other side. It was topped with barbed wire, but it stretched only a little way into the bush, so it was an easy scramble around through the trees to the front of the building where a driveway curved up to its roller door entrance. The roller was usually closed. I’d seen inside a handful of times, but Genie had yet to time it right. We were in luck that day: the roller was wide open.
She peered into the dark and took in the sugar mountain. It was all the warehouse contained, one giant hill of raw sugar. It reached almost to the top. A dark, sticky liquid oozed from the mound, like an oil slick, near the doorway.
‘It’s higher than last time,’ I said. There’d been a ship in the week before. I stepped over the puddle of liquid. There were no workers in sight, just a dormant bulldozer off to one side, its outline dim in the shadows.
I saw a flash of colour then: Genie speeding past me. She leapt and landed on that mountain, arms and legs all starfish.
‘You craz—’
‘What’s the matter, you chicken?’ She rolled over onto her back, crystals sliding off her hair and her cheeks, licking granules off the side of her mouth.
I followed suit and ran at the mountain, taking three or four dragging steps up its side, my feet leaving large dents, before I too fell forward. I slid down on my front beside her, Genie whooping.
I rolled over, the sugar moving beneath me, my hand meeting hers. We lay together, crystals sliding down our jeans and into our sneakers. I wondered if her quicksand phobia had been a joke. I wondered, too, if her whoop had alerted any workers. We crept to the roller door and looked out. A truck was passing on the road below, but we couldn’t see anyone around.
That was when we noticed the bird.
A sparrow was caught in the sticky syrup, trying to flap its one free wing, only it was more of a weak flutter than a flap. Its other wing was stuck fast. ‘We have to help her,’ said Genie. I thought, at first, she was hoping we could set the sparrow free. I knew it wouldn’t live; its feathers were matted and soaked in the thick brown goo, some bent and misshapen. ‘We have to put it out of its misery,’ she said.
I scrambled down the bank and searched for a large stone. When I returned, Genie was lying on her front in the liquid, crooning to the sparrow. She stood up as I approached, her pink t-shirt all tacky, brown patterns.
‘Don’t look,’ I said.
She ignored me. ‘I’ll do it.’ She took the stone and lowered it carefully on top of the bird, as if she were merely covering it in a blanket. Then she pushed her weight on top of it until we heard a crack. When she lifted the rock, the bird’s body was smashed and lifeless. ‘Others must get caught too,’ she said, picking the broken sparrow up gently by its feet, a few feathers remaining stuck to the ground. ‘It must look so nice to them, a delicious bath, a sweet bath of sugar.’
We buried the bird in the forest. Genie named her Ophelia. She said it was a female, didn’t have the dark brown front of the males. She arranged a few leaves on top of the small mound of dirt, her fingernails black from digging, then walked away.
Still now, when I smell a packet of dark brown sugar, I’m reminded of the sparrow and trapped bees and the feel of a sugar mountain against my back. But what I mostly remember are Genie’s fingers laced with mine, sticky with sugar dust.
I could still feel granules of sugar in my sneakers when we shot the movie later. We’d returned to the works. Ty drove us all down in Curtis’s car, an old Holden Belmont.
‘Not like Curtis to lend his pride and joy.’
‘Yeah, well, guess who’ll be giving it a wash tomorrow.’
Nina and Bernard joined us. They were part of the gang. We’d planned to shoot at one of the old refinery workers’ houses. They’d been sitting empty for years, a row of four double-storey brick dwellings, built sometime in the early 1900s. They looked like they’d landed through a portal from England. Their lower windows were all boarded up, but we knew a spot around the back of one where you could climb up and lift a small sash window.
We were making a horror short. I was playing the villain, Ty doing most of the shooting; he was better at it than me, had a knack for the camera. ‘Think Dracula meets The Shining,’ he’d told me. Genie had brought her father’s axe along. I chased her across the field with it when we got out of the car, all the way to the Gloop Hole, doing my best Jack Nicholson/Torrance impersonation, Genie screeching and laughing, Ty running after us with the camera.
It soon dawned on me that Ty’s motivation was less about a horror masterpiece and more about Genie. He shot her over and over: wearing a white petticoat moving waif-like behind a window of the old house; creeping up stairs; running through the pine forest. We shot her tied to train tracks too. There was a short, abandoned railway line in the bush, once used for the works. She screamed at the imagined train, all wide-eyed terror, a damsel of the silver screen. Ty said we didn’t need as many shots of me. ‘Better to keep the audience in suspense.’ He shot my arm reaching for her throat. My feet climbing the stairs. My hunched back. Nina and Bernard were both killed off early. Shots of the axe swinging, of their bodies lying tangled in the junk yard, fake blood we’d picked up from the novelty store splattered over their throats and hearts.
We made a fire on the beach that evening, a small bay that was near the works, passing a joint Ty had nicked from Curtis’s stash between us.
Genie danced and shimmied in the sand with Nina, the two of them mirroring their bodies. I caught Genie’s stolen glances at Ty when she thought I wasn’t watching. I’d seen the care he’d taken rearranging her arms in certain shots. The way she’d giggled. The thrill he must have felt, touching her skin. He was as much in love with her as I was. She was like that, Genie. She cast a spell. Even Nina was enamoured.
Genie brought up Ty’s entrapment in the pipe later, sitting on a log, the fire dying to embers. Ty had mentioned the chute again, about Curtis going inside it.
‘Would you do it?’ Bernard asked him.
‘Yeah, I reckon.’
‘Hah,’ laughed Genie, ‘bet you wouldn’t.’
He stared at her. ‘Yes, I would.’
She laughed again.
‘What?’
‘I hear you freaked out inside a pipe.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Ty, flicking his eyes at me.
‘Not what I heard.’
‘What, in the junk yard? That was years ago.’
‘Yeah, well, still don’t think you’d go in the sugar chute.’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘Bet you wouldn’t.’
‘Would.’
‘Bawk, bawk! Prove it.’
It was all part of her game, a flirtation made of teasing.
I woke sometime in the night, a remnant of a scream in my ears. I wasn’t sure it was one I’d heard or a sound that had filled my dreams. I thought I heard sobbing, doors slamming, noises next door. Then silence.
I must have dozed off again.
I remembered the disturbance in the morning and went to check on Genie, but their van wasn’t in the driveway and no one came to the door. I went to see Ty, too, but he wasn’t there either. His mum said Curtis had taken off up north in his Belmont with some mates. She thought Ty was with him. ‘Yeah, probably,’ I said, more so she wouldn’t worry. Ty and Curtis didn’t usually hang out.
When Curtis returned three days later, there was no Ty. He said he hadn’t seen him since the night Ty had borrowed the car. That’s when Ty’s mum called the police.
There was still no sign of Genie, either. I peered in her windows. Could see the same crappy furniture still in place. But I knew. Could sense the desertion. I stared in vain, hoping to see her sneakers piled at the door, her black jacket draped over a chair, fresh flowers in a vase on the table—she was always picking flowers. There was only the bunch of daisies she’d picked the week before, now brown and wilted.
The days stretched into a week. The police knocked on doors. Asked after Genie and her father. Everyone talked about Alice Brewerton. About serial killers and keeping our children safe.
In the end it was a blockage that revealed the body, a fortnight after the three of them vanished. One of the trapdoors beneath the sugar mountain had jammed—wouldn’t open and let the sugar fall through to the conveyor belt below. The story hit the news that night. I vomited up my dinner, right there in the living room. The body was yet to be identified, and they were checking there weren’t any further bodies in the mass. The manager was interviewed. Crooked Bill himself. William Wolfe was his name. When asked about safety measures, he blamed a factory worker who had now left the company, said the lock up routine had been missed. Said they’d now put systems in place to ensure it could never happen again.
I pictured Ty and Genie making a secret pact. Creeping out in the dark. Regrouping with a torch in the wee hours.
I thought of her words: Prove it. Imagined their escapade, climbing up onto the wharf via one of the chute supports—a criss-cross structure like a power pylon. Running down the end and into the chute’s enclosure, creeping up the long arm, and on and on, crawling through the tunnels to the warehouse precipice. I saw Ty going first, leaping off into all that sugar, thinking he’d run down its dune. We’d missed the danger zone earlier that day, Genie and I, landing low, where the sugar was compacted. The sugar at the top was softly settled, the granules recently cascading in a waterfall off the high conveyor belt. Anyone leaping from the end of the chute would drop like a plumb bob, I learned later, down inside the heart of the sugar mass, buried alive, their body slowly sinking further over the passing days, undisturbed and undiscovered by the bulldozer driver who shovelled the sides of the mass.
I tried not to think of it, tried not to think of their plummet, of Genie’s voice: Bawk, bawk. But my thoughts turned again and again to the image of them struggling under there. They would have tried to pull themselves up out of it, only sinking further, their arms moving the sugar ever heavier on top of them. I thought of them trying to gasp for air while the sugar filled their nostrils, their mouths, their throats. I wondered how long it had taken.
I wondered too where her father was. Gone to find her? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d run away. She’d gone through a phase of it at 14, she’d told me.
The confirmation came a day later. One body, they said. Male. 16.
A new horror movie filled my head then. Genie watching Ty leap. Poised to follow. I pictured her running in panic when she realised what had happened. Unable to drop down to help him, knowing she’d meet the same fate. Running, running back for help, through the metal bowels of the factory and down its long gangway arm, an airline passenger terrified of flying.
Had she been there at all? Had she led him to it? I thought of the noises I’d heard in the night. Thought of her father’s stare, his axe, and the nick in Genie’s ear. I thought of her screams, the one I’d heard in the dark, so like the ones she’d made tied to the train tracks, Ty training the camera on her.
It was then I remembered the footage.
I watched it over and over in my uncle’s den—he helped me splice the rolls of film together. Ty had done a great job, a film noir natural. I longed to see his face. He was everywhere, and yet nowhere to be seen, there in the carefully chosen high and low angles, the extreme close ups. Nina screeching. Bernard stumbling. Genie all luminosity, even in her over-acting, her hamming it up for the camera. The sugar works a brooding presence in the background.
It was only on the last viewing, after I’d sat staring at the blank screen, the film projector still whirring, that I saw the extra footage I’d missed added at the end: Genie lying on a bed—Ty’s bed—lips pouting. A shaking next, the world turns topsy turvy, and then… there he is. Ty. Smiling at the camera, the shy grin he had, his crooked canines, the dimple in his cheek. There one moment, then gone the next. The world turns earthquake once more until the camera straightens and settles back on Genie’s face. And, for a fleeting moment, like time-lapsed clouds staining the Earth then rolling away, I saw it, a look I’d never seen before. An unguarded moment. Genie, but not Genie. Something askew in her core.
And then she’s back, a fire in her eyes. A giggle. Ty’s outstretched hand. A lollipop now in the frame, its sugary sweetness turning to liquid on her tongue.
A final wave at the camera, before she blows a farewell kiss, straight down the lens.