Last Bridge Before Home

by Lily Malone

  There were a lot of kids in the water. ‘Where?’

  ‘Look for a boy with a one-armed man.’

  ‘Oh! Well, that makes it easier,’ Jaydah said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Erik is my ex-husband. I don’t think you two have met,’ Ella said. ‘The lady in the water with them is Heidi. She’s the aunt of one of the kids in Erik’s swim team. She’s lovely. She’s Erik’s new lady friend.’

  ‘Lucky for her she’s lovely, eh?’ Jake said.

  ‘Well, she is lovely and I’m glad,’ Ella defended. ‘If anyone deserves to find someone lovely, it’s Erik.’

  Jaydah moved her gaze from the group out in deeper water to Jasmine standing knee-deep a short way off to their right. Every time a wave came Jaz would lift her shoulders and jump as the cold water crept up her thighs.

  In her bright orange bathers, deeper tan lines stood out across the general light brown of her back. Her calves were darker than her thighs, and her arms and shoulders were darkest of all.

  She’d put some weight on in the week since Christmas. Jaydah made a New Year’s resolution to keep a better eye on what her sister ate. Jaz had always loved her food, and didn’t really have that much idea about the five food groups. If Jaz had her way, she’d eat two-minute noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus morning snack. Because they’d had Christmas and been on holiday, there’d been Christmas treats and leftovers, and her mum had been making her traditional Philippine foods again: lots of rice and noodles and gorgeous tasty sauces! Just thinking about dinner made Jaydah’s mouth water.

  Jaz’s weight hadn’t ever been a real problem—unlike she’d read for other families with adult dependent children—because the Monster had worked them all so hard every day. Now though, if she and her mum didn’t keep an eye on it, Jaz’s weight could quickly bloom, and then it would get harder and harder to encourage her to diet and exercise to stay fit and healthy.

  The ocean swung and glistened and, after the heat of the walk in the sun, Jaydah could imagine the cold chill of diving in.

  Brix dropped their towels in a heap and took off his sunglasses, hat and shirt, then threw his thongs on top of the pile. ‘Coming in, JT?’

  ‘You bet.’ She squirted sunscreen into her palm and rubbed it into her face, neck and shoulders. ‘What about you, Mum?’

  ‘Not me, my Jaydah. It is too cold for me. I don’t like the sand.’ She folded a towel, bent to flick sand from it, and sat.

  Ella, Jake and Brix walked down to the water’s edge, feet sinking into the soft sand.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Jaydah asked her mum.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  She suspected her mum might be crying behind her large dark glasses, but she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she said.

  ‘You take your time, Jaydah. I am fine. I will watch your sister.’

  ‘She should be safe. We have a swim coach and an Olympic swimmer all out there ready to step in.’

  ‘I will still watch her,’ her mum said, folding her arms about her knees.

  * * *

  Brix dived and came up gasping. It was cold, but the shock was nothing like diving into the ice of the beaches at Denmark, Walpole or Albany. The water on the south coast always blew straight off the Antarctic. Here the bays were more sheltered and it was the Indian Ocean rolling in, not the Southern.

  Jaydah surfaced beside him, water beading on her sunscreen-covered skin, and she flicked her hair from her face and called back to the beach. ‘Come on in, Jaz!’

  Jaz stood in the shallows, edging deeper. Each time a wave came through, she stood on tiptoes with a squeal, arms hugging her waist.

  Brix dove again, surfaced, and powered into freestyle to get the kinks out. He stopped about fifty metres from the beach where the water ebbed from green to a deeper blue. He flicked sea water from his hair and eyes and trod water, staring back at the beach before sculling slowly towards the others, perving on his wife.

  Unashamedly perving and proud of it.

  Jaydah was smiling at a dark-haired, happy-faced woman who must be Erik’s girlfriend, Heidi. They stood a little separate to the others, fanning their arms through the water, Jaydah making ripples. He loved her new blue bikini. Did you call that thing a bikini? The bottom was more of a skirt. The top was old-style. He liked the top. He liked the top a lot.

  Against her darker skin, with her black hair straight off her forehead, all wet and slinky and smoothed over her skull, the bright aqua-blue was stunning. She’d picked the colour because she said it matched her wedding ring. She was gorgeous, but she always had been.

  His gaze left Jaydah briefly to take in the huge one-armed man in the water just a few metres to her right.

  ‘So, Sammy, you look straight up to the sky, okay? And when your arms comes round they are a windmill, they don’t stop. It is not one arm and the other arm like this.’ The big man demonstrated and Brix swallowed a chuckle because it must be a challenge demonstrating backstroke with one arm. Come to think of it, it must be a challenge teaching any swimming stroke with one arm. How did he do it?

  ‘They all are arms going at the same time,’ Erik finished.

  Brix had heard of Erik Brecker. He’d also heard of Ella Davenport, but that’s only because she was around the same age as him. When he and Jaydah had been in their final year of high school, she’d been smashing records at the Australian swimming trials, a golden girl smiling shyly from a podium with a fistful of medals around her neck.

  He remembered there’d been a scandal when she didn’t make the Beijing Olympic team, and then she’d married Erik, her one-armed German coach. After that, for a few years, the Breckers were magazine faces in a sea of far more famous faces: Pitt’s and Hemsworth’s and Beckham’s. Then he didn’t see them anymore.

  But how did a one-armed man teach swimming, and be world-renowned for it? It took some doing. Brix paid more attention, swimming closer until it was shallow enough to stand.

  Beside Sam, Ella too cartwheeled her arms in demonstration, but it was Erik who did the talking.

  ‘They go at the same time, all the time, and when they come through at the top you rotate your shoulder, and the back of your arm comes so close it could touch your ear. Your head is back. It is back all the time looking at the sky today but if you were in a pool, looking at the ceiling. Straight up. Okay?’

  ‘Got it,’ Sam answered clearly.

  He lay back in the water and started to stroke, kicking his legs hard enough to splash froth and bubbles.

  ‘We will worry about his kicking later,’ Erik said to Ella.

  By now, Jasmine was in water as deep as her bellybutton, almost as deep as Ella, and her eyes switched between where Sam powered away doing backstroke, and Erik, standing tall with Jake.

  ‘You haven’t wet your hair yet, Jaz,’ Ella said. ‘It doesn’t count that you’ve gone for a swim until your hair gets wet.’

  ‘It’s too cold,’ Jaz said, and she pointed at Erik. ‘What happened to his arm?’

  Brix swallowed another chuckle. You had to hand it to Jasmine. She’d asked the obvious question straight away.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ Erik said. ‘Well, I was born like this. Nothing happened to my arm, it just did not grow when I was a baby. I have a little hand and a little arm. See?’ He peeled the sleeve of his rash vest higher, and they could see the stump and mini-fingers where his shoulder attached.

  Jasmine’s eyes opened wide. ‘It’s a baby hand. It’s like a doll hand.’

  ‘It makes swimming very tricky to stay straight,’ Erik said, and he plunged in a powerful dive backwards into the water and came up, back-stroking one-armed towards the horizon, but curving on an exaggerated arc as if he was a canoe with only one person rowing. He came back to them and stood straight in the water, smiling.

  Ella laughed, and by now, JT and Heidi had joined them and Sam had backstroked back to the group, watching too.

  ‘Do you want to try swimming, Jaz?’ Jaydah asked her
sister.

  ‘Not that one,’ Jaz said. ‘I don’t want to go in circles.’

  ‘Ha!’ Erik said. ‘No swimmer I teach will ever swim in circles! What is your name?’

  ‘Jasmine.’

  ‘Miss Jasmine, I will teach you the magic tricks and you will go straight as straight, okay?’

  ‘Ok-ay,’ Jaz said.

  ‘First you have to get in the water. Can you do this?’ Erik said. ‘Sammy, you show her.’

  Sam took a big breath and held his nose, jumped up like a tin soldier and then let his knees bend and collapse so his shoulders and head submerged. Then he sprang up with water streaming.

  Jaz jumped up and collapsed forward into the water in a belly-flop. She bobbed up quickly, gasping as the cold shock hit.

  ‘Sam? Run up to the beach and get your noodle for Jasmine,’ Ella said.

  Sam shot from the water to the beach and returned holding the floatation device.

  ‘We put this around your shoulders, like a big chair.’ Erik bent the noodle into a horseshoe and demonstrated with Sam. ‘Then you lean back and hold this bit here and kick your legs.’

  Sam sat back in the noodle, kicked hard and powered away.

  ‘I can do that,’ Jasmine said.

  They helped her arrange her noodle ‘seat’, and she laid back and was off, slapping the water crudely with her kicks.

  ‘I hope she stops before she hits Africa,’ Jaydah murmured, because Jaz didn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

  ‘Race you to catch her, Jake,’ Brix said.

  ‘You’re on.’

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before Jaydah got too cold to stay in the water watching the swimming lessons, and she made her way back onto the beach.

  Her mum had come down from the tent and stood at the shoreline with her pants folded up around her calves, waves washing at her feet. Jaydah stood beside her mum and both women put a hand to their eyes to shield them from the sun as they watched Jaz’s swimming lesson.

  ‘It makes me happy and it makes me sad to watch her,’ her mum said.

  ‘I know what you mean. Me too.’

  ‘I never knew Jazzy would love the water.’

  ‘I know, Mum.’

  It wasn’t possible not to be happy as they watched Jasmine in the water, hanging onto the noodle and kicking as Erik towed her forward. Yet the sadness was a dent in the joy. All these opportunities Jaz had missed!

  ‘We never even went to the beach,’ her mum said.

  ‘It’s a long way to the beach from Chalk Hill.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘When you learn to drive though, Mum, you can take her anytime you like. We’re much closer to the beach where we’re living now with Brix.’

  ‘I can’t stay there forever, my Jaydah. You need your own space with your man. We are squashing you. A young married couple needs time on their own.’

  Jaydah dug her toes into the sand. Every time the waves came, they eroded the sand around her feet and she would sink that bit further.

  ‘He owes us, Mum. Dad owes us for everything he did to us.’ And she couldn’t contain it. The words burst from her. ‘I hate that man. I hate him.’

  ‘I hate him too.’ Her mum put her arms around Jaydah’s shoulders, the first time in years and years that she could remember her mum being the one to offer comfort because it had always been the other way, because her mum was too scared of her husband.

  A wave came through the shore and they both jumped. Sea water splashed up her mum’s legs, wetting her pants. She stumbled and Jaydah, with her feet buried in sand, slipped. They landed on the wet sand on their bottoms.

  The next wave gurgled around them, cold, clean, brisk. Her mum squealed and kicked her feet at the water and sand.

  Then Brix surged out of the sea, all broad-shouldered and dripping. He put his hands down to Jaydah and her mum to help them up, but at exactly the same time, the two women dragged on Brix’s hands instead.

  He could have saved himself, Jaydah knew, but he let them crash tackle him onto the sand until he sat on his butt, quite happily, as if he’d meant to end up sitting there between them all along.

  Maybe he did.

  * * *

  ‘Have you spoken with Mum and Dad since Christmas Day?’ Brix asked Jake over a beer on the balcony of the beach house, as the afternoon gave way to sunset and they admired the colours in the fading sky. A draft caught the breeze from below, drifting up to the second floor. Both brothers sniffed the scent of searing meat appreciatively.

  ‘I rang to wish them Happy New Year last night,’ Jake said. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Brix took a slurp on his beer and lifted the bottle to the sky to admire the golden glow.

  ‘How’s it all going with you then, over at your place? You coping with married life and the in-laws?’ Jake asked, using one foot to rub specks of sand off the other.

  ‘Yeah. It’s different, but it’s good.’

  ‘When do you have to go back to work?’

  ‘I’ve got another week off.’

  ‘What’s Jaydah going to do for work?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think she’ll just have a holiday for a while and settle Rosalie and Jaz in. There’s no rush.’

  ‘I bet the Chalk Hill Club was sorry to lose her,’ Jake said.

  ‘Yup.’

  His big brother squinted at him, one eye closing against the sun. ‘So you really never knew Jaydah had a twin?’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Weird, hey? Does it feel weird to you?’

  ‘Not anymore. It did when she told me—I thought I knew everything there was to know about JT—and then when I saw Jaz for the first time on Christmas morning and she looks so much like JT, but then the more you’re around them they’re not alike. Jaz is her own person.’

  ‘Does it worry you?’

  ‘Does what worry me?’

  Jake’s hand waved the beer bottle. ‘All of you living together? I mean, when you look to the future. Like, when you guys have kids, I guess. Do you think about how you’ll take care of all these people plus your own kid or kids? That’s a lot of responsibility.’

  ‘The thing I think about most is what happens if I get it all wrong and I stuff it up.’

  ‘Stuff what up?’

  ‘Well, if Jaz isn’t happy at our place with us. Or if Rosalie can’t settle in. She’s shit-scared Keith will come and drag her and Jaz away in their sleep. The thing I want more than anything is for JT—for all of them—to be happy. God knows, they haven’t had a lot to smile about in life so far. Do you know something I found out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get this: Jaz covers her mouth when she smiles because Keith always told her she had ugly teeth. He told her they disgust him. Can you believe that?’

  ‘I’d believe anything of Keith Tully, mate,’ Jake said. ‘Has he tried to make contact with them?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He wouldn’t want to. I don’t think he’s allowed to, anyway. They got a restraining order.’

  ‘I knew he was a grumpy bugger but I didn’t know he’d hit them.’ Jake scowled at the sunset. ‘I didn’t know he’d keep one of his daughters a secret so he could collect her welfare payments.’

  They drank in silence for a while, watching a group of teenaged boys play cricket on the road in front of a house a few doors up. They had those wicket sets that were joined in one piece and every time the bowler hit the wickets, they’d topple and clang.

  ‘Did Mum say anything to you about some secret to do with Abe?’ Brix said to Jake after a while.

  ‘Nah. What kind of secret?’

  ‘When I asked Mum about Jaydah wearing her wedding dress I said she had to promise to keep it secret. She said she was good at keeping secrets, and then on Christmas Day she said she’d kept the secret about Abe all these years. I didn’t know what secret about Abe she meant. Do you?’

  ‘Mum comes out with all sorts of things these da
ys. She forgot she didn’t live at the farm anymore on Christmas night. When Dad said it was time to go home she didn’t know what he was on about. She said she wasn’t going anywhere. She got real snooty about it.’

  Brix laughed, but he quickly sobered. ‘It sucks, doesn’t it, this bloody tumour?’

  ‘Yeah. She got dealt a shit hand.’

  ‘Have they talked with you about what they want for Mum’s end of life? About what Mum wants?’

  ‘She says she wants to go into the Hospice at Albany because she doesn’t want to be a burden.’

  ‘That sounds like Mum. What did the old man say to that?’

  ‘He thinks he can look after her at home. He wants her at home with him.’

  ‘He’s not gonna want to let her go,’ Brix murmured. ‘He won’t know what to do with himself without her.’

  ‘I know. I guess we just have to wait and see. None of the doctors want to take a stab at how long she’s got left. They say anywhere from a week to six months. She could be fine for four months and go downhill in a week. They don’t know,’ Jake said, putting his now-empty bottle on the balcony rail.

  Brix drained the last dregs from his own bottle and stood it next to Jake’s—two brown bottles on sunset vigil—as the cricket game got louder and the sun sank low, then lower, and silently disappeared.

  CHAPTER

  23

  ‘But I hate these shoes. They hurt my feet. They’re too tight. They’re too hot,’ Jasmine declared, staring at her feet and kicking to dislodge the pair of solid Rossi workboots they’d bought for her yesterday at the rural workwear shop in Margaret River.

  ‘You have to wear closed-toe shoes for your new job, Jaz,’ Jaydah said. ‘These are the same as the boots you wore on the farm. I don’t see what the difference is?’

  ‘It’s not fair! I don’t want to do work,’ Jaz said, and her mouth took that stubborn slant. ‘I don’t want to do work at all. It’s too hot. It’s too hard. I want to go swimming!’

  ‘It’s cool in the winery. You wait and see. You won’t be working out in the sun.’

  ‘I don’t want to work.’ Jaz folded her arms. ‘It’s not fair. It’s not my choice, it’s you being bossy!’

  Jaydah puffed air through her lips and wished for the patience of a saint. ‘I thought you’d love to try this new job. Brix went to a lot of trouble to speak to his work to see if there were some jobs there for you to do.’