The Labyrinth of Drowning

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If I had wings, I could fly away. Grace Riordan improvised the lyric and the music in her head, infinitely sad. More often there’s no way out, she thought. The Thai woman, the one with no name, had only gone so far. From the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in the southwest of the city to the dry soil and sandstone rocks of northern Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Under trees that gave off the sharp, antiseptic smell of eucalyptus, she lay with the back of her head broken open against the ground. The floodlights set up by the police cast a monochrome glare over the woman and the surrounding bushland.

Grace was used to death; it was part of the work she did in law enforcement. But sometimes you met with something that brought you to a stop; where the reality was too powerful for you to brush it aside. The woman’s dress, flimsy and girlish, was partly torn away, the fabric thickened with blood. The torn pieces clung to her, held in place by the belt left around her waist, seeming strangely obscene. Not only the back of her head but also her legs and arms, which were small, almost delicate, had been smashed. Her face and torso were covered with the marks of the beating she must have thought would never stop, not while she was living. Someone had broken this woman down piece by piece until she might not have been human and then left her here for someone to find. Seeing her was like walking into a glass wall.

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