Usually she was a chatty mother, talking to Jo even when Jo was being surly and dismissive, but now she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her daughter. All those hours in the police interview, she was ashamed. She was useless to Jo. To comfort or reassure Jo was impossible and wrong. It was wrong, wasn’t it?
‘Mandy, that’s not true. I’m here to help, and David too. Poor David, it was a big shock for him.’
Poor David, Mandy thought. Poor fucking David, living in another state with his clever wife and his two sons, not even offering to come and see Jo, not offering anything. Relaxing back on his couch in Adelaide, he could pretend it was happening to someone else’s daughter. He didn’t have to worry about dealing with this shit. ‘I know you want to help, Mary, I know.’
Outside in the backyard, the strong wind had transformed the ancient Hills hoist into a spinning wheel. It creaked, whirling erratically, like the wheels at local fundraisers run by stocky, middle-aged Rotary men.
‘It’s about luck — it was bad luck. Every night young people like Jo and Ashleigh are careless and stupid, and most of them get away with it. But Jo and Ashleigh didn’t get away with it. They should’ve known better. Should’ve …’ Mandy began to cry. ‘I can’t stop crying, even though I know it’s useless. My life — as if it’d been a piece of cake up to now — is a mess. I’d hoped for another kind of life for Jo.’
‘It’ll get better,’ Mary said. ‘People’ll forget. Life’ll go back to normal.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mary,’ Mandy yelled.
‘Mandy, please. I didn’t mean —’
‘Ashleigh is dead. She was eighteen years old. A child. Jo loved her. I loved her … Her parents have lost a daughter and Jo is responsible.’ Mandy shook her head. ‘It’s never going to be normal again, for any of us. I can’t see any possible recovery from this.’ She sat back in the chair and put her head down on the table. Would there ever be a normal again? Her daughter was alive, but less than five minutes away Rae was making preparations to bury Ashleigh. Life wouldn’t go back to normal, not for her and certainly not for Jo.
Mandy was exhausted, spent. How could she go to work after this? How could she walk through Yarraville to Coles and stand behind the deli counter while the locals, people she’d known for years, came in and bought their olives, their bacon and cheese, and chatted about the weather, school, the council, the new development, while she measured and sliced? But she needed to work. They had no savings. They lived week to week, and if she didn’t work they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills. She’d have to ask for a transfer, to another supermarket in another suburb, somewhere where she’d be anonymous, where she wouldn’t be a constant reminder to Ashleigh’s family and friends that she was Jo’s mother, and that Jo was responsible for Ashleigh’s death.
‘Mandy. Mandy.’ Mary was calling her gently. ‘Are you —’
‘Am I what?’
‘I thought you were off somewhere.’
‘I wish.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘What can we do? We are going to sit and wait. Wait until the police and the lawyers do whatever it is that they do. Like you said, limbo.’
‘They won’t send her to prison. Not for an accident.’
‘She’ll go to prison, Mary.’
‘We can’t let that happen.’ It was a plea.
‘There’s nothing we can do to stop it.’
Mary could be hurtful and thoughtless. She blamed Mandy for getting pregnant young; she blamed Mandy when David moved to Adelaide. But Mary and Jack had supported Mandy with Jo. They babysat and lent her money, and in return all they asked was to be included in Jo’s life. And so Mandy included them. It had been more difficult since Jack died, but Mary loved Jo and Jo loved her grandmother. Mandy hoped that their love would survive and be strong enough to help them deal with the grief and the guilt, with the bloody nightmare they were trapped in.
Chapter 13
Sarah weighed her piece of chicken and put on the steamer. What she craved was a vindaloo curry, saffron rice, a garlic naan, and lots of hot mango pickle from the Curry Vault in Bank Place. And a glass or two of merlot, on the balcony.
The pale chicken breast was bland. She sprinkled sea salt and ground pepper on it, along with a squeeze of lemon, and served it on a plate with broccoli, mushrooms, and carrots. Protein and three vegetables, Weight Watchers–style. No potatoes. Potatoes aren’t a vegetable. Fidelity to this diet would be rewarded. If she shed a kilo a week, over the next three months she would’ve shed twelve kilos, which wasn’t enough but would inch her closer to her goal weight. If she lost the weight, she could wear the clothes she bought last time she went on a diet, which were now shoved to the back of her wardrobe: expensive bootleg jeans that even then required lying down on the bed and sucking in stomach muscles to get the zipper up; a silk designer dress from a boutique in Toorak Road that the shop assistant said was ‘so fashion forward’ but that she’d only worn once. If she lost the weight she’d be normal, and her mother might finally see beyond her body. If she lost the weight, she could sit comfortably on the train, on aeroplanes — if she ever managed to save enough to go travelling again.
She spread the contents of the Joanne Neilson file on the table. She was meant to give eating her full attention. No reading at the dinner table. Mindful eating, they called it in the diet books. This mindful eating somehow, magically, translated into weight loss. But if she concentrated on eating her tasteless dinner, she’d get depressed. When she was depressed she ate more, and thought more about weight and being fat — it was such a waste of time. If she added up all the minutes and hours and days over her thirty-four years that she’d spent worrying about her weight, it’d add up to half her life. This is how they kept women in their place: imagine what women could achieve, what she might’ve achieved, if she didn’t spend so much time hating and obsessing over her body and trying to transform it to match some unrealistic ideal.
She read through Jo’s statement. Jo was driving. She was drunk. It was Jo’s attitude that concerned Sarah. During the interview, Jo was too controlled. There was no visible sign of remorse or contrition. She didn’t cry, not even when the questions focused on her relationship with the dead girl, Ashleigh. This worried Sarah, because people were always judging women and making judgements about them.
The evidence from the other two girls — Mani and Laura — was damning. They’d made an effort to be fair: ‘She’s a good driver,’ Mani had said. ‘I felt safe with her. Maybe there was something on the road, oil or something.’ But in the end, their answers to the police questions said it all: Was she drunk? Yes. Was she driving too fast? Yes. Was she arguing with Ashleigh? Yes. Did anyone tell her to slow down? Yes. Did she slow down? No.
Sarah mapped the preparation needed for the case: identifying people to interview and those willing to give references and testimonials. Her aim was to uncover Jo’s story. If there were some extenuating circumstances, something in Jo’s background — poverty, abuse, or illness — that would explain, if not justify, her drinking, Sarah would track it down. She hoped that there was a long line of respectable people who were prepared to speak on Jo’s behalf. To say she was polite and friendly, that she helped little old ladies cross the street, that she had a bright future.
It was the storytelling part of the law that fascinated Sarah. The challenge of finding a way of turning the ‘accused’ into a person, someone real and vulnerable; someone that the judge (and jury, if there was a jury) would warm to and empathise with. There was a way of presenting the evidence, the arguments, that gave the court a sense of the person beyond the crime, before the crime. Storytelling was what made the difference between a good barrister and a mediocre one. The prosecution would produce victim impact statements from the dead girl’s parents and her sister, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles and friends. These would be sad accounts. Narratives that woul
d fill the courtroom with grief and with anger, that would make no sentence seem long enough.
Of course, some clients lied. When Sarah was a child, her mother would say, ‘Don’t bother, Sarah, I can tell when you’re lying to me.’ It wasn’t a bluff — no matter how elaborate or straightforward, no matter what voice or tone Sarah used, her mother picked the lies. Sarah had inherited the gift, but there were times when she wished she hadn’t. Greg, one of her clients, a young guy, robbed several stores and bashed a teenage girl who was working at the petrol station in order to save enough money to go to Bali with her girlfriends at the end of the year. The girl spent six months lying in a coma in a hospital. At the hearing, the doctors said that even if she lived, she would be paralysed, and might not be able to read or write. ‘She loved to travel,’ her mother told the court. ‘There’s a big map of the world on her wall. With pins marking the places she’s planning to visit. Should I pull it down before she comes home?’ In court, Greg cried; he apologised; he was remorseful. Sarah knew he was lying. There was no evidence in the stories other people told about him that he had any redeeming qualities. It made mounting a defence difficult. She had the skills and the training to argue on his behalf, to plead for the minimum sentence, but she hoped he’d get the maximum and no one would let him out again. He had a ‘good’ story: a tough life. His parents were addicts, rarely conscious enough to bring up a child. They tried but failed to look after him. Society owed him, but she knew that he’d re-offend.
Jo wasn’t Greg. Jo wouldn’t go out and deliberately hurt someone. She wasn’t evil or malicious. But Sarah knew there wouldn’t be many people lining up to tell her the sorts of stories that would convince the judge to keep Jo’s sentence to a minimum. Jo was an ordinary young woman from a working-class family. She had been irresponsible, negligent, thoughtless; she’d driven while she was drunk and had a fatal accident. Luck, good and bad, was responsible for so much, but the law wasn’t interested in arguments about luck. If Jo had been stopped by the cops that night, before the accident, she might’ve ended up with a fine and lost her licence, she might’ve been charged and ended up on probation. The difference was what — a spill of oil on the road? The difference was a life. Ashleigh’s life.
Sarah read her notes on Jo’s police interview again. ‘Best friends,’ Jo had said, ‘since Year 7.’ Was there a story in that? Sarah didn’t have a best friend. People drifted in and out of her life, rarely staying long enough for any real intimacy to develop. She saw some of her university classmates a couple of times a year. Her ex-girlfriend, Laine, was living in New York. If they were both in the same city, they might’ve continued to see each other, but it was clear now that Laine didn’t intend on coming back, and the emails and Skype calls were becoming less and less frequent. Occasionally Sarah went to Friday-night drinks with her colleagues, but she could hardly call them friends. Of course, there had been Ada; Ada was the closest Sarah had come to having a best friend.
What made Jo the kind of person Ashleigh would have as a best friend? What made Jo the kind of person that would have a best friend? What was Jo’s story? And what if Jo didn’t have a story? Were some people only ever secondary characters in other people’s narratives? If Jo didn’t have a story, how would Sarah give the judge insight into her life, create empathy?
When she was working on Greg’s case, she’d been confident that the right story, told effectively, could shift the court — not just the jury, but the judge too. There had to be evidence and precedence, sure. But stories had power.
That was the danger of a good story: you could elicit pity and empathy for even the worst sociopath — for his rotten childhood, for the abuse and the bullying — and if it impacted on the verdict, on the sentencing, then a killer could be set free to go on killing. People often said, ‘Just tell the truth,’ as if there was a truth and it could be told by one person, as if it could be contained in one story. Sarah believed telling good stories, the ones people listened to and were swayed by, was a responsibility. It worried her that some people did not take it seriously enough.
From the large window over the sink, the sunlight, bright and glaring, beamed into Mandy’s kitchen and exposed its flaws. The white gas stove, wedged into a brick alcove that had once housed a wood-fired oven, was scarred black with scratches and scrapes. The boarded-up chimney had cracks in its brickwork and a black soot coating that someone had unsuccessfully tried to cover over with dark blue paint. The sink under the window was stained and dented, and the red formica table, with its four matching chairs, was just old. The chairs needed reupholstering, their vinyl seats faded to a dull pink. On the wall opposite the stove hung an old print of a basket overflowing with bread. Underneath it, on the bench, there was a chipped crystal bowl with some oranges and apples. Even though everything was spotless, the room looked weary and worn out.
‘I only have instant coffee,’ Mandy said to Sarah. ‘Not much of a coffee drinker. Jo says no one drinks instant anymore.’
‘It’s fine,’ Sarah said. ‘My mother’s a coffee nazi, but I drink anything and everything.’
The latte set to which Sarah’s mother and most of the legal fraternity belonged thought drinking instant coffee was sacrilegious. Sarah’s mother gave long lectures to anyone who would listen on the dangerous chemicals used in the process of making instant coffee. She rarely drank coffee and bought only organic blends. For Sarah, instant might not be coffee, not in the same way that espresso was coffee, but she drank it with milk and sugar, in her clients’ kitchens, in weatherboard houses in the western suburbs of Melbourne. The coffee, served in big thick mugs around which she wrapped her hands, opened up the way into difficult conversations.
‘How long have you lived here?’ Sarah asked.
‘All my life, except for a couple of years when Jo was a baby. My mother was born in this house.’
‘Guess you would’ve seen a lot of changes,’ Sarah said.
‘My father used to say, “Yarraville’s getting too big for its boots,” and the changes were only starting when he died. If he was alive now, he’d hate it. He was a boilermaker, worked in the local foundry. When I was a kid all our neighbours were workers — factory workers, rail workers, wharfies, or labourers. A couple were tradies. A few worked in shops. I remember the Kokinos, who owned the fish and chip shop. Mrs Kokinos’s arms were covered in burn scars from the splattering hot oil, and the kids, especially my friend Helen, were always falling behind at school because they worked in the shop most nights.’
‘Very different now,’ Sarah agreed.
‘A lot of those people have left. The rents are too high, and you get sick of being looked down on. Some people can’t hide their contempt. We’re bogans, losers, trash. It’s tough on our kids — they go to school with kids whose families can go overseas twice a year and buy all the new gadgets before they’re even in the shops.’
‘I’m surprised the wealthier families send their kids to the public schools,’ Sarah said.
‘Most of them bus their children to private schools in Werribee or Geelong or South Yarra because the local schools aren’t good enough. But the lefties, like Ashleigh’s parents, who are so committed to public education that they send their children to the local high school, take over the school councils and expect everyone else to tow the line. Jo doesn’t want to be like me. She wants to be like them.’ Mandy sighed. ‘I can’t blame her. I want her to be … to have a better life.’
When Sarah was growing up, she knew that there were people in her street who were poor and she knew her mother was a snob who avoided some people. But she hadn’t thought about how much those poorer neighbours might have resented her and her family.
They continued talking about the social problems arising from gentrification while Mandy set out the mugs, put the milk, full fat, and the sugar, white, on the table, and leant against the bench, waiting for the kettle to boil.
The previous day at th
e police interview Sarah had not had a chance to pay much attention to Mandy. Now she noticed how much Mandy looked like Ada: the same shoulder-length straight brown hair, with a fringe that covered her eyebrows. It was the sort of shapeless haircut that Sarah’s hairdresser would’ve despised, but Sarah couldn’t imagine Mandy sitting in Christina’s chair for three hours at a time and paying the $200 for the privilege. Like Ada, Mandy was a plain dresser. Like Ada, she was average — average height, average build. Mandy probably didn’t belong to a gym or go on diets. But Mandy was older than Ada — her hair was threaded with grey streaks, and the first fine wrinkles were developing around her eyes. Ada wasn’t going to get old.
‘Where is Jo?’ Sarah asked as Mandy placed the mugs of coffee on the table and sat down opposite Sarah.
‘In her room. Just lies in the dark. She’s come out to eat a couple of times when I’ve called her. Not that she eats much.’
‘How are you going?’ Sarah asked.
‘I’m struggling. I’m worried about Jo, about money.’ Mandy’s voice quavered. ‘Sorry, it’s not what you came to talk about.’
‘Mandy, it’s a tough thing you’re going through,’ Sarah said, realising that Mandy was working hard at being stoic and composed. ‘You’re grieving for Ashleigh and for the life you imagined for Jo. The legal system is slow, and it may take months before the hearing. It leaves everyone hanging. Most people need some support. I can organise a counsellor or a social worker.’
‘Thanks, Sarah, but I’m not much of a believer in counselling. Life is tough, and paying someone to listen to you talk about it isn’t going to make it any easier. But you came to ask me some questions?’
Sarah opened her notebook and wrote the date on top of a new page. ‘I’d like to know more about Jo.’
‘What kind of things?’ Mandy asked.
‘Your relationship, her childhood, her relationship with Ashleigh. I need to get more sense of who she is.’
The Bridge Page 18