Last Bridge Before Home

by Lily Malone

  ‘Yes.’ Rosalie looked at him through big brown eyes, so like Jaydah’s, and didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘The clutch, Rosalie. Remember? The pedal on the floor on the left.’

  Rosalie looked at her feet and slowly, carefully, pushed down on the brake.

  ‘Not that one, Rosalie. The clutch.’

  Rosalie pushed the accelerator and Brix gritted his teeth. ‘Nope. Not that one either. The clutch is the other way … all the way over.’

  This time Rosalie pushed in the clutch.

  ‘Good job. Keep your foot there. Now see what this does?’ Brix put his hand on the gear stick and moved it left and right. ‘Now you can move the gear stick easily. That’s in neutral now.’

  Rosalie moved the gear stick as if to nudge it would break it.

  ‘You can’t hurt the car, Rosalie. It’s tough, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So neutral is the easy one. That’s when you can push this stick left and right like this. All this way.’ He put his hand on Rosalie’s and they moved it together. ‘Neutral is where we start. Now keep your foot on the clutch and I’ll show you first.’ He moved their hands. ‘Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth. And this one is reverse, when you want the car to go backwards. Reverse is a bit harder to find. We won’t worry about four-wheel drive for the moment.’

  He took his hand away and Rosalie moved the gears herself.

  ‘Excellent. So let’s turn it on, shall we?’

  * * *

  ‘You should see your face!’ Jaydah said, about an hour later, when his Toyota was safely parked back beneath the peppermint tree and his world had stopped being one of lurch, stop. Lurch. Stop. Stop. Lurch. Hop. Stall. Start again.

  ‘I think that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life.’ He glanced across at her mum to see if she was listening. She wasn’t. Rosalie had grabbed the broom and was sweeping the verandah.

  He let her sweep.

  Sweep, Rosalie. Sweep!

  ‘Do you know your mum doesn’t know her left from her right?’

  ‘She does so.’

  ‘Not in my car, she doesn’t. I’d say the indicators were on the right and the next second she’d have the windscreen wipers on. Jaydah, she has no idea.’

  ‘It’s just nerves, Brix. It’s a complete unknown for her. She’ll get better if she keeps at it. You put yourself in her shoes. She would never have had a car in Manila. I bet no one she knew there owned a car and she never would have travelled anywhere by car. Then she came to Sydney where there were buses and trains to wherever she needed to go, and then we came here and my dad always drove. He didn’t want her to be independent so he never allowed her to take lessons. Driving a car is like something from the movies to my mum. I think she did pretty good, actually.’

  ‘Pretty good? I don’t think we got out of first gear unless we were in reverse, and I reckon she goes backwards faster than she drives forwards.’

  Jaydah grinned at him. ‘It was your idea, Brixy. Next time just let her make you breakfast and wash the dishes.’

  ‘Come here and call me Brixy, and we’ll see what happens to you.’

  CHAPTER

  21

  That week between Christmas and New Year with Brix was the first holiday Jaydah could remember. She went to bed happy. She made love to Brix in a bed, after a lifetime of the couch at the Bowling Club, and tumbling around in the backseat of cars, always scared they’d be busted, never long enough to love how they wanted to love.

  Now they had a bed!

  Her mum was still first to rise in the morning, but she’d stopped making breakfast for Brix and she’d mastered the art of loading the dishwasher.

  They couldn’t stop her cleaning—by now she’d washed all the curtains and taken a bucket and rag to the cottage windows—but Brix said it was a small house: eventually she’d come across everything all clean and tidy and she’d be forced to stop scrubbing because there would be nowhere dirty left to scrub.

  Jaz stopped asking to go home. Every morning she, Jaydah and Brix would wander over the hill to see if the horses were by the fence, and they’d take a couple of carrots or apples.

  Once the animals realised Jaz was offering more than a handful of dry grass, they were keener to come say hello.

  ‘You were right about Jaz, JT. When she smiles at those horses, it’s like she gives the horses the apples but we get back the fun,’ Brix said.

  Beautiful words, and she tried to hold them tight and not let the winds in her thoughts blow them away, like the days in the quarry with the kaolin clay.

  After seeing the horses they’d all wander back to the cottage via the whale rock, where they’d watch the birds preen and squabble, and then Brix would give her mum a driving lesson.

  Jaydah had always known Brix was no quitter. He’d promised to help her mum learn to drive and he never broke a promise, but his dogged determination to help her mum improve, along with the patience of a saint to explain clutch, brake and accelerator and how hard to press them time and again, was something else again.

  She’d lost count of the number of times she’d heard him through the Toyota’s open window as her mum negotiated the gravel track that looped from the house to the vineyard. ‘Slowly … let the clutch out, Rosalie … SLOWLY!’

  The Toyota would churn through gravel and paddock, come shuddering to a stall when her mum missed the gears, and Jaydah would hold her belly and laugh.

  It was the laughter that truly brought home to her how much their life had changed since Christmas. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t worried about something. Her sister. Her mother. Herself.

  Her father.

  Her mum said Keith might hunt them down—that the VRO wouldn’t stop him—and sometimes when Jaydah woke in the night, and if Brix’s arm wasn’t thrown over her, anchoring her tight … she’d wake in a shock from a dream and she’d be so sure it was her father looming over the bed. She could see his red and grey checked shirt, his black eyes shining like a snake’s. Sometimes that black shape felt so real she’d wake striking up through the covers, kicking at that black thing and her heart would race …

  Then Brix would murmur and roll towards her. The shadow-man dissolved to nothing. He’d touch her hair and settle, only with his arm across her waist this time like he’d never let go, and she’d lie listening to him breathe and hope and hope and hope that he’d never let her go. That her happiness didn’t feel so damn fleeting … like the wind.

  But that was at night.

  In the daytime nothing could touch her.

  As Jaz created her farm montage under the lemon tree, talking to the animals in shushed tones, Jaydah’s energy and her happiness bubbled and burned.

  In the end, it was the need to do something to express her buzz that made her dig her kali sticks out of the place where she’d unpacked them, and step out in the sunshine on the lawn in front of the cottage.

  * * *

  ‘So what have we forgotten to do, Rosalie?’ Brix asked, as the Toyota engine revved to a pitch that threatened to do his head in.

  ‘Indicate?’ Rosalie said.

  ‘Nope. We don’t need to indicate. We’re not turning anywhere. We’re just on the straight stretch.’

  The engine whined.

  ‘Change gears!’ Rosalie said.

  ‘That’s right. Can you hear how the engine is kind of screaming? It wants another gear. It’s time to move to second.’

  The Toyota picked up speed, sending dust flying behind its wheels and the engine screamed … then relaxed as Rosalie changed gears perfectly.

  ‘I did it!’ Rosalie shouted from the driver’s seat. ‘I did it!’

  He’d shut his eyes. Now he opened them. ‘You did.’ She did. ‘Great job. We’re in second. Now how about we try third.’

  ‘Okay!’ Rosalie said confidently, and she concentrated on keeping them straight on the track, before moving nicely into third gear, slowing again at the top of the hill wher
e they could look down on the neighbour’s horses, and executing a smooth turn to head back to the cottage.

  ‘Good job!’

  They were making progress.

  He’d been concentrating so long on Rosalie and her driving, and watching the wheel and the gears and the foot pedals and the road—making sure Rosalie had them correctly lined up to get through the open gate—that he didn’t see Jaydah on the front lawn until they were almost stationary and he could finally unwind his knotted bones.

  It took him a while to work out what she was doing because her hands and arms were a constant blur.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ he voiced aloud, as Rosalie turned the key and the engine cut away to nothing but clicks and groans of protest at the rough treatment.

  ‘Ahh. She is practising her Sinawalis,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘Sinawhat?’

  ‘This is Jaydah’s kali. She is practising sinawali, it means to weave in my language.’

  The movements held him captive.

  She was both graceful and lethal, all at once.

  ‘So I put it in neutral,’ Rosalie muttered, mostly to herself, moving the gears. ‘And I turn up the handbrake.’ The abrupt grate of the handbrake shot rudely through the cab, breaking Brix from his trance.

  ‘That was really good, Rosalie,’ he said, and they both got out of the car.

  Brix wandered towards the gate post and leaned against it, elbows on the top, watching. His heart swelled as Jaydah toiled, her muscles slick, skin shining in the morning heat of summer.

  Her exercise gear clung to her body. Short shorts, a tank top, sports bra beneath, all black. Her hair was pulled high on her head, back in a tail that whipped behind her as she moved, and yet whipped so gracefully it was as if even her pony tail was controlled.

  She must have felt him watching because she smiled and switched her movements, bringing footwork into the routine. Her arms and wrists rotated and whirled so fast that the sticks she carried looked like one blur, although he knew they were two. He’d taken two sticks off the brick wall of the lounge room at the Tully house on Christmas Day.

  She lunged, holding the sticks parallel, one arm over her head and one below. Then she pirouetted before striding forward and releasing the sticks like lightning into that weave again. What had her mum called it? Sinawali?

  His warrior princess in Bruce Lee mode.

  She could move like this? Yet she’d never lifted a finger to strike her father?

  Jaydah strode towards him, smooth and confident in her whirlwind, dangerous dance. The sticks hummed and stirred whispers of wind towards his face.

  Her eyes met and held his through the whir and blur, so that they were alone in the sun on the lawn, while magnets spun and struck and pulled them together on hidden strings.

  She stopped. The sticks fell to silence.

  ‘Like what you see, winemaker boy?’ she said, and he realised he was breathing harder than she was, and his mind was already thinking of what they’d done in his kitchen on their wedding night, what they’d done the last few nights and mornings, and what he planned to do to her tonight.

  He had to swallow before he could speak. ‘Very much. You’re amazing.’

  Her teeth flashed in a smile bright as the day.

  ‘My wife is an amazing woman.’

  ‘Yeah but you can teach my mum to drive. That makes you more amazing.’

  He shrugged. ‘If you say so. I can handle being amazing.’

  She tapped his shoulder with a stick before he could blink.

  ‘You’re the one who insisted I was amazing,’ he muttered.

  Her hand whipped out and back and he felt the same tap on his other shoulder but the stick was already gone, tucked safely behind her shoulder like it hadn’t ever moved.

  ‘Okay. You’re the more amazing,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. You’re too kind.’

  CHAPTER

  22

  They kept New Year’s Eve low key. He and JT stole away with a small esky of beers to watch the sunset from the rocks above north point at Gracetown. Jake and Ella had invited them to come up to Peppermint Grove Beach on New Year’s Day, and stay a couple of days at the holiday house they’d rented in the beachside town.

  Jake had booked the place months ago. He, Ella, Sam and Charlotte had been there for a few days already. Then Jake had driven to Perth to put Charlotte on the plane to travel back to her mother on the Sunshine Coast.

  The beachhouse slept eight and Jake said they were floating in it, and there was plenty of room.

  When they found the address and parked, there was already an extra car in the driveway beside Jake’s Landcruiser—a battered and dented Troop Carrier that would have looked more at home in the red dust of the outback than by the beach.

  ‘Do you know whose car that is?’ he said to JT.

  ‘Nope. It’s definitely not anything Taylor would be caught dead driving.’

  ‘Ah, nooo,’ Brix agreed, unbuckling his seatbelt as the three women climbed from his car.

  He strode up to the house and saw a sign taped to the front door that said: We’re all at the beach. Walk down the street to the playground and follow the path. Look for us on the left.

  Brix tried the door handle. The place was open. Obviously, Jake wasn’t worried about someone stealing the family jewels.

  ‘They’re at the beach,’ he called back to Jaydah and her family. ‘How about we bring our stuff inside, get changed and we go for a swim?’

  It should have been a five-minute job, but nothing with his new family took five minutes.

  Jasmine didn’t want sunscreen on her face because she didn’t like the smell, so Jaydah had to talk her through that, and that she had to wear a hat, but the new straw hat they’d bought her was scratchy and she didn’t like it and it wasn’t orange, and she wanted her old hat and where was it anyway?

  ‘You can’t have your old hat, Jaz. It’s at the farm. It’s at Dad’s place.’

  ‘It’s not fair. I don’t like this hat. I didn’t choose this hat. I want to go home.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow we can go find a shop and buy an orange hat, okay? Wear this one for now so you don’t get burned.’

  ‘Could you call Dad and he could bring my hat?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘There’s no beach at Chalk Hill. There’s a beach right here. Let’s go look at it. You can see if it’s like the Home and Away beach.’

  ‘Can I take my farm animals?’

  ‘They could get lost in the sand, Jazzy. It’s better to leave them here and play with them later.’

  ‘It’s not fair. I want to go home.’

  ‘Maybe you could bring two horses. Your two favourites. But you have to take the best care of them, okay?’

  She brightened like someone flicked a switch. ‘Okay! I will. Come on then, let’s go!’

  ‘Sunscreen first, Jazzy. Come on.’

  ‘It’s sticky. It scratches. It gets stuck in my hair. It’s not fair.’

  Rosalie didn’t want to go to the beach at all but was too scared to stay in a stranger’s house on her own, which meant she was still worried Keith might come crashing through the walls.

  Eventually, between Brix and Jaydah, they coaxed Jaz into applying sunscreen and Rosalie into coming too, and they left the house and walked in sunshine that was growing increasingly hot, towards a beach they couldn’t yet see.

  Jasmine got more excited about the beach when she heard the waves. Soon, she ran ahead through a carpark packed with holiday-makers, where seagulls screamed for chips being thrown in the air by a young girl.

  A footprint-dented sandy track led through the dunes and Jaz took off along it. Jaydah hurried to catch her sister, leaving Brix with Rosalie. The soft sand was harder for Rosalie’s shorter legs and she was soon out of breath, slipping and tripping as sand filled her shoes.

  ‘Take your shoes off, Rosalie, it’ll be easier,’ Brix said, pulling his own th
ongs from his feet and hooking them through his fingers.

  He heard a shout up ahead, and Jaz ran back to meet them. ‘It’s like the Home and Away beach! It’s right here. Come and see!’

  Even Rosalie picked up the pace and soon the track widened into a spread of sand and sea, as if a magician shook out a blue and white cloth and laid it out before them.

  The water was far calmer than the title credits of Home and Away, and there were more people strewn between towels and boards and beach bags than Brix could remember from any glimpse of the television show.

  Lucky it was a never-ending beach. It didn’t feel crowded.

  A man’s voice shouted his name and he looked up the beach to see Jake, bare-chested, waving from beneath a shade tent pegged into the sand.

  Brix returned the wave and looked for JT. He found her standing with Jaz at the ocean’s edge, feet in the wet sand.

  ‘JT?’

  When she looked up he pointed south to Jake and Ella’s tent in the sun. She gave him a thumb’s up and said something to Jaz before she turned and joined him in their walk up the beach.

  * * *

  Jaydah hugged Ella in greeting. ‘Happy New Year!’

  ‘To you too,’ Ella said, skin warm and grained with salt and sand as she let Jaydah go and moved to hug Brix.

  Jake took his turn greeting Jaydah, leaning low to wrap her in another set of safe, strong Honeychurch arms.

  These men and their arms!

  She caught Ella’s eye and winked. They were lucky girls.

  ‘You remember Jake and Ella from Christmas Day, don’t you, Mum?’ Jaydah said to her mum who hovered behind them in the bright sun as if she needed a password to cross into the shade.

  ‘I do remember. Happy New Year, Jake and Ella.’

  ‘Same to you, Mrs Tully,’ Jake said.

  ‘Call me Rosalie, please,’ she whispered.

  ‘Doesn’t Sam like the beach?’ Jaydah asked, because she’d looked for Ella’s boy and hadn’t seen him anywhere.

  ‘He’s having a swimming lesson.’ Ella laughed and pointed to the water. ‘Out there.’