Page 11 of Lyrebird

Laura stares at Solomon from the window.

Then everyone looks at Solomon.

‘Tell her,’ Bo says to him.

‘What?’

‘She’s looking at you to see if it’s okay. Tell her that we only want to talk.’

‘Joe wants the dog,’ Solomon says honestly, and Rachel chuckles.

Laura disappears from the window.

‘Smooth,’ Rachel smirks. The two are now delirious from the lack of food.

Joe is about to bang on the door when it opens. Mossie runs out and she closes the door again and locks it.

Joe storms off while an excited Mossie dances around him, almost tripping him.

‘I’ll ring Jimmy,’ Joe grumbles as he passes. ‘He’ll sort her out.’

‘Wait, Joe,’ Bo calls after him.

‘Let it go,’ Rachel snaps. ‘I’m starving. Let’s head over to the hotel. Eat. Actual food. I need to call Susie. Then you can make a plan. I’m serious.’

Rachel rarely loses her temper. The only time she flares up is when something is disturbing her shot – people in the background making faces, or Solomon’s mic boom appearing in the frame – but when she does lose her temper everyone knows she means it. Bo knows she’s pushed them too far.

She gives in, for now.

Back at Gougane Barra Hotel, Solomon and Rachel dig into their dinners, not uttering a word, while Bo thinks aloud.

‘Tom must have known about this girl, right? He was the one who checked that area, that was part of his responsibility, checking the well a few times a week. You can’t check the well without noticing the cottage. Or the vegetable plot, or the goat and chickens. It would be impossible. And there’s the extra items of food on the shopping list, the bookshelves and the book from Bridget. Plus, Mossie knows her, so Tom must have brought him to visit her.’

‘He’s a dog,’ Solomon speaks for the first time since he started eating ten minutes ago. ‘Dogs wander. He could have met her himself.’

‘Good point.’

‘Met her,’ Rachel says. ‘Do dogs meet people? I guess they meet people who speak dog,’ she jokes, then stops laughing when the others don’t join in; Bo because she’s not listening, Solomon because he’s sensitive about mocking Laura. ‘Whatever. I’m going to call Susie.’ Rachel takes her plate of food with her to another table.

‘What is that thing she was doing? The noises?’ Bo asks Solomon. ‘Is it a Tourette’s thing? She growled and barked and chirped.’

‘As far as I know, people with Tourette’s don’t bark at people,’ Solomon says, licking the sticky sauce from his fingers before taking a bite of his pork ribs.

The sauce is all over his face. Bo looks at him in disgust, not understanding his absolute inability to function without food. She stops picking at her green salad.

‘You have your food now, why are you still snapping at me?’

‘I don’t think you handled today well.’

‘I think you’ve been jet-lagged, moody and irritable all day,’ she says. ‘Extra sensitive – which, for you, is saying a lot.’

‘You scared Laura.’

‘I scared Laura,’ she repeats, as she always does, as if saying the words again will help her to process them. She does the same during interviews with interviewees’ responses. It can be unsettling for them, as though she doesn’t believe them, but really it’s her trying to grasp what they’ve just said.

‘You could tell she was frightened. You could see a young woman, surrounded by four people in a forest. Three of us dressed in black for a funeral, like we’re ninjas. She was terrified, and you were filming.’

That set-up seems to occur to her suddenly. ‘Shit.’