The List
Violet Dallow had been keeping a list of missing women for as long as she could remember. She read everything, kept folders, drew maps in the back of her schoolbooks. She had a little sister called Jasmine who hero-worshipped her, and a private conviction that paying attention to the dark was the same thing as being safe from it. On a school camp in Silverton, behind a toilet block in the dark she had spent half her life studying, Violet learned the difference.
Violet Dallow could feel a missing woman the way some people could feel rain coming.
Not metaphorically. There was a particular weight at the back of her skull when she walked past a place a woman had last been seen, and the weight was the same whether the woman had vanished last summer or in 1923. Other people in Broken Hill walked past those same places and felt nothing. Somebody had to.
She had decided, early, that it was going to be her.
Her little sister Jasmine knew all the names. Violet had recited them often enough that Jasmine could have done the list in her sleep. The two of them in the dark, the names passing between them like a private language nobody else in the house spoke.
Violet was not afraid of the dark. The dark, in her view, was just where the answers lived if you were brave enough to go and get them. Cleverness was a kind of skin. Curiosity was a torch. Paying attention was the difference between the women on the list and the women who were not. Violet was going to be fine.
She found out, in the dark she had been studying since childhood, what every woman on the list had found out. Paying attention had never been the variable.
