I take out the copy of On the Road that someone sent me and I flip through the pages. Today, I’m thinking maybe it’s my dad. He’s spent a lot of time on the road. I don’t know, it’s the second book that someone has sent me with no letters, no return envelopes, no address on the package.
I smile at Tracey, who is sitting on the other side of the courtyard, keeping to herself, probably trying to work her head around all that stuff from the past that goes around and around in girls’ heads because we never know how to get it out. Tracey and I have been talking a bit, sharing the same table when we all get TV time. I’m making friends in here, slowly, taking it one day at a time. I open On the Road and begin the story. As far as I can tell it’s about a couple of guys who are sick of their wives and girlfriends, so they go on the road and try to have as much sex with random women as they can until they reach some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Can’t say I like it much except for this one great bit somewhere near the start where the main character talks this woman into having sex with him and it lasts about two seconds and she just ends up lying there on the bed yawning out of boredom with the whole thing until he goes away. I don’t recognise myself in these pages.
Girls don’t go out into the world and take whatever they want. Girls have to compromise.
Or maybe they don’t. I guess I didn’t in the end.
HOW I GOT THAT ACCESSORY TO ASSAULT CHARGE
I think I was a little shocked when I pulled back the heavy blinds from the windows at the Novotel and all that thick buttery light streamed into our previously pitch-black room. The digital clock said it was past nine. Asheeka got up slowly and walked across the room, navigating her way through half-eaten plates of things, then pulled at a bunch of plastic bags from our 7-Eleven shopping trip and stared bewildered at the random cans of vegetables we’d bought because we thought we might get around to eating them in between the packets of chips. She stood there in her pink pyjamas making coffee for us before bringing it over to our bed and dumping a plastic bag of Snickers bars and strawberry milk between us.
I heard the buzzing of the phones next to me again and leaned over so that I could turn the sound up. They had buzzed and hummed so much in the night that I’d had to turn them off. It was my mum. I picked up the phone without answering it and watched as her face and the word ‘Mum’ flashed up until the whole screen went blank again.
Asheeka fished into the plastic and pulled out a packet of pretzels and tucked herself under the heavy doona again. I watched her as she put those pretzels into her mouth one after the other. My body felt stuck there beside her in that bed. She picked up her phone and I felt my heart jump to the back of my eyeballs and then a couple of seconds later – that’s when she broke in two. I watched her click, scroll, click. Panic. Click. Scroll. Click. Pointing. Clicking. Her hand over her mouth. Point. Click.
I moved over closer to her. The hand over her mouth was stifling her own screams. Then there was a picture from Instagram, it flashed up so quickly, a pale brown breast poking out of her school shirt. It was beautiful, in a way, like the kind of arthouse photography stuff we learned in class. The school shirt was unbuttoned down to the navel, the white of the fabric framing the breast so you couldn’t help but look at it, perfectly round and unblemished. The messages flashed and faded so quickly that it was hard to catch what any of them said. And there were more pictures of naked parts of Asheeka’s body. Lots more. And then they were gone.
Asheeka threw the mobile phone across the room where it continued beeping on the floor. We both laid there for a while until I could hear her anger bubbling up to the surface of her skin. ‘Fucking dickhead,’ she said.
It was then that she grabbed a fork and a knife and a spoon from the kitchenette and the car keys from the table and a couple of cans of corn in a plastic bag and marched right out of our room in her pyjamas and no shoes. I followed in the backstream of her rage until we turned a corner, and another one. When we reached the end of the hallway the doors of the lift opened and there they were: the police. Suddenly things were turning out the same way they always turned out in romantic comedies but it wasn’t nearly as funny.
The older one walked out of the lift without thinking and started to move down the hallway while we got in. The younger one, this almost-kid with red hair and freckles, began to move forward too before he stopped and stared at us.
‘Hello,’ he said in this nervous voice like a robot that was trying to show a sort of programmed kindness. Asheeka hit the ‘doors closed’ button in a panic but he turned around and got back into the lift with us.
‘Do you think I could have a chat with you, ladies?’ he said.
Asheeka’s eyes were darting towards the door and then to him and then to the glass walls of the lift. And then it happened. I wouldn’t have thought she was so strong. One quick hard swing to the head with a can of corn and that officer collapsed into a heap.
The lift went down with us standing there straight as pins and him collapsed on the floor. When the doors opened we ran. Outside, at the car, Asheeka proceeded to do the thing she’d really had in mind when she picked up those cans in a bag and the random cutlery: she whacked a huge dent into the bonnet of Arnold’s car and then proceeded to draw a long scratchy line down the side with a fork.
‘We have to go,’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ she said, and gave that car another epic whack with the vegetables we would never get to eat. So I grabbed her arm and I dragged her into the big red leatheriness of that car and we sped off, Asheeka with her arm out the window still stabbing at the car door with a fork.
A FURTHER EXPLANATION OF THAT ACCESSORY TO ASSAULT CHARGE
‘So, that’s how accessory to assault on a police officer was added to the list of charges,’ I explain. Tracey demands to know lots of stuff now that she’s my new roommate. I’m lying there in my bed, staring up at the bottom of her mattress as she turns over on her bunk. ‘It wasn’t actually me, it was Asheeka, but, as I now know, when you’re with someone who assaults a police officer and you run away with them, leaving that police officer to travel up and down and up and down in a lift with his head smack down on the cold floor until another panicked police officer can find him, that’s when you become an accessory to assault.’
There are footsteps in the hallway and we both go quiet for a while. There’s no talking after lights out and there’s definitely no talking about why we are in here. It’s the first thing you’re told you’re not allowed to do – ask someone about why they’re in here. As if it wasn’t the most obvious first question anyone is going to ask anyone. Doesn’t stop people, though. We’re not meant to ask because, according to Maree, no one in here is labelled by what they did, they’re trying to get beyond it and not be defined by it. But here’s the thing – we’re all defined by those labels, can’t escape them: you’re the slut in short shorts, you’re the breasts on Instagram; you’re the houso kid; you’re the spaceship with your head in a book the whole time; you’re the tall poppy who needs to be cut down, mowed over, hit on the head with a giant hammer.
The footsteps fade and Tracey rolls over again, leans her head over the edge and looks down at me. I can make out her long thin fingers hanging over the bedside above me even in the thin light streaming in off the hallway. She’s got that loneliness that so many of the girls in here have. Her family is from somewhere up north but the courts can send you anywhere, even if it’s too far for your family to visit that often.
‘I’m in here for theft, mostly,’ she says. ‘Lots of shoplifting. A couple of break and enters, vandalising public property. I got too many warnings and then I ended up here but, you know. I never hurt anyone. It’s just that everyone else had a lot of stuff and I didn’t. I don’t see what harm it does, Just Jeans losing a couple of jumpers or if a bit of the nice stuff that people with too much nice stuff have goes missing. They don’t need so much nice stuff.’
‘Doesn’t sound so bad,’ I say, and she gives me a kind of half-smi
le before pulling herself back onto her bed.
I never meant to hurt anyone. Like that police officer. I feel really bad about it. I do. I met him again the day when he came to testify in court. His wife was there in this floaty floral dress, must have been about eight months pregnant and scared of all the things that might come. I told him I was sorry. I said it both on the stand and later when I saw him outside the court and I really meant it. He smiled a little and said, ‘Where’s your friend?’ like he may as well give it a try. I shrugged my shoulders. I’d been asked that question too many times now and I was tired of trying to convince people that I genuinely didn’t know where Asheeka was.
To tell you the truth, if I could say anything about that day it’s that when she hit that police officer, I think all that anger scared her so much that there was no turning back. She’d become what she always was, someone who understood that, if she were to keep going, she would need to fight anyone who got in her way, including me.
AND THEN THE NEXT CHARGE THAT CAME SHORTLY AFTER THAT
But let’s get back to what happened after the assault in the lift thing. After that we went to Bunnings. We were freaked out and that’s all I could think of to save us. We were still both wearing those matching pink pinstriped PJs and clutching a plastic bag with those cans of corn in it. I’d convinced her to get in the back seat because I didn’t feel like it was safe to have her anywhere near a steering wheel. I watched her in the rear-view mirror. Snot streamed from her nose, which she wiped with her sleeve. To tell you the truth, that was the most disturbing thing. Not entirely for its grossness but for how thoroughly un-Asheeka it was to be so unclassy. I drove around to the back where the only cars were the delivery vehicles coming in and out.
That’s when she got out of the car and took aim again, stabbing the bonnet with the top of the fork and running the blade of the butter knife around the car until she managed to make some of its iridescent paint chip off. She did this for ten minutes, hitting and stabbing and scratching so hard that the head of the fork popped off and its sharp broken edge cut into her hand so bad that it started to bleed.
‘Fuck him,’ she said as she melted to the ground right there. I leaned down near her and tried to put my hand over hers but she pushed me away with her foot and I knew that there was no touching her that day. I sat there and let the sun heat up the concrete until it felt like a fire beneath my bum.
‘Do you think I killed him?’ Asheeka said.
‘No. He’ll be fine I’m sure. Just a headache.’ I gently pulled that bag with the corn in it out of her hands. This was probably the point at which I realised I was really starting to think like a criminal, when I was looking at a can of corn and I recognised it as a weapon and I knew that it was important to get rid of the evidence.
I took it to the dumpsters and threw it in, then I took it out and put it back again, making sure that it was covered with bits of paper and wood and things. When I got back to the car there was this guy leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. Asheeka was ignoring him and he was looking at her with his head cocked curiously to the side and making really inappropriately formal small talk like ‘nice weather we’re having’ and ‘what brings you to Bunnings today?’.
I leaned up against the car bonnet and stared at him like everything was cool. He was cute and scruffy in a tradie way, dark curls and muscles on his arms pushing against his shirt. He dragged on his cigarette again. Looked at Asheeka. Looked at me.
‘We’re all watching you inside there,’ he said, ‘on the security cameras, and my boss is like, we need to call the cops, but I thought maybe you already looked like you were having a pretty bad day as it is and I said I’d come out here and ask you to stop bashing up cars in the parking lot, and you know, see if you need anything.’
He looked like James Dean with curlier hair.
‘We’ve had a really hard day, you know; her boyfriend’s a bit of a dick,’ I said.
‘Right.’ A grin grew on his face. ‘So you beat up his car?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s badarse. Do you need some help? Want me to kick the tyres a couple of times?’ He kicked the front tyre softly and looked at Asheeka. ‘This one?’ He moved around to the other side of the car and kicked that one too.
Asheeka looked up and gave him a weak smile. She clutched her hand where it was bleeding.
‘Did he do that to you?’ the guy asked. We didn’t reply.
I bent down and looked at the licence plates. Pulled at them hard but nothing happened. ‘Can you get the licence plates off? Do you know how to do that?’
He shifted awkwardly, crushed his cigarette butt under his boot. ‘No . . . I don’t think so.’ He blushed. ‘They’re watching us on the cameras. It’s, you know, a criminal offence, I think.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’ll be leaving then.’
He nodded, moved away. Looked back as I pulled Asheeka up off the ground.
We both sat in that car for a while gathering our breath. Asheeka started to explain. ‘When Arnold took those pictures of me, I didn’t want him to really, but I also made him take more and more. I just wanted him to get the picture right, like, I mean, I wanted to look good, I wanted all the parts of my body to look their best. I didn’t want him to have them but at the same time, if he was going to, I wanted to look like something you’d see in a magazine.’
As I began to reverse, the Bunnings guy came running back towards us and tapped on the window.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Her hand is cut.’
He handed me a box of gauze. Inside there was something heavy. I sat there in the driver’s seat and opened the box. Inside there was a Swiss Army knife contraption with a screwdriver. The kindness of it came as a kind of shock and I had to catch my breath before speaking again.
‘I thought you looked beautiful,’ I said, and we drove away.
I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY
At that point, that’s when I think we knew there was no turning back. I guess in a book this is called a defining moment, but you never know where they are when you’re living the story, only when you’re looking back at it. There was no question now, though, that we had definitely crossed over to the other side. We weren’t girls fumbling with a car we’d taken out for a spin, or girls being glamorous in their new red lipstick and hotel rooms filled with room service and fluffy bathrobes. Breaking the law just came easier after that. It was a more thoughtful thing, a weighing up of the risks and benefits (and sometimes not).
Asheeka sat in the passenger seat, sipping on a strawberry Moove, and adjusted the sunnies I’d nicked at a convenience store to cover her puffed-up eyes. We’d traded our licence plates with some from a random car sitting by the side of the road. Our phones were gone. Our wallets. Everything that said we were us had been left in that hotel in Canberra.
Asheeka looked over at me. ‘Do you think I’ll go to jail for hitting that police officer if they catch us?’
I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed impossible to me then that something like that might happen but I guess, thinking back on it now, maybe I knew she would, we would, or I wouldn’t have kept going. We drove further inland. Everything was flat, like flat for a thousand miles flat. You know all those Australian movies with those big fat wide-screen images of red dust and the golden sun-kissed plains? I never thought that all that stuff was real either until we got on that road to Jindabyne. There was just so much not-Parramatta stuff – acres and acres of dry straw-like grass and the odd weatherboard house with a cow. I wondered what young people could possibly do out here? There were definitely no Macca’s parking lots, just sky.
We pulled over after a little while, somewhere on the highway, between mountains. Asheeka leaned back against the car and peed and I was pretending to look at the sheep in the distance but really I was watching the thin trail of pee crawl down the asphalt and wondering how it was possible that a girl who never wanted to be seen without a complete face of makeup was suddenly all r
ight with peeing in public.
Lucky for us, there were still the two dresses that Asheeka had decided she didn’t like as much and had thrown onto the back floor after our shopping trip. I pulled them out and we took our pyjamas off right there by the side of the road and pulled our dresses over our heads.
I couldn’t help it. I walked out into the field next to the road and lay down on the ground and stared up at the sky. I’d seen characters do this in movies a thousand times; it was inseparable from my image of what people did with big sky and big land. When I turned my head I could see heat waves lifting up from the asphalt and disappearing into the blue.
‘What are you doing?’ Asheeka’s face appeared above mine, the blazing sun creating a halo around her head.
‘Just watching things.’
‘Why?’
I could feel myself disappearing into the earth. I am dirt. I am the colour red. ‘I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea, you know. Taking in all this space.’
Asheeka laid down beside me and looked up into the sky. ‘What if we just, like, start again? Start a new life.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘how we gonna start a new life? We don’t have anything.’
‘I don’t know. We’ll get jobs.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t know. Something. You’re always overthinking things. Just slow down all that stuff that’s going on in your head all the time. Let’s just go. Imagine, just you and me. That’s it. No more complications. It’ll be like a holiday. Let’s just go on a holiday together. Maybe, you know, in the country. In the mountains or something or whatever there is in the country.’
A truck rocketed past on the freeway and I could feel the vibrations coming up from the ground and through my body. I looked up at the sky. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much sky without buildings in it,’ I said. ‘So much sky.’
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