‘I only have a bank keycard,’ Jo said, realising as she pulled it out of her purse that she would have to come up with some story to explain the name difference.
‘You said your name was Ashleigh — what’s the J?’
‘Joanna Ashleigh Neilson,’ she said. ‘But I hate Jo, so I go by Ashleigh.’
‘Do you have any other ID?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘just the card.’
‘I’m supposed to get a couple of IDs. A driver’s licence?’
‘I don’t drive. But I can take some money out of my account and give you a deposit. Okay?’
‘Sure. I guess if you know the pin, it must be your card.’
Sue and Laurie lived in a large two-storey brick house on the hill at the back of town. From their living room, there was a view of the wide expanse of the bay, of the south part of the township and their own extensive garden, divided into several sections — herbs; vegetables; an orchard with apples, oranges, figs, and plums; and a large section of native bushes and flowers. That first afternoon, they sat on the balcony and ate hot pasties with Sue’s homemade chutney. Laurie asked endless questions — what are you doing in Portarlington? How long will you stay? What work do you do? Did you finish school? Are you planning to go to university? Jo was as evasive as she could be. I needed a break. Not sure how long I’ll stay. I’m a waitress. I haven’t finished school, but I plan to one day. Not sure about university … Finally Sue said, ‘Laurie, enough with the inquisition. Lunch doesn’t give you the right to pry. If she has secrets, she’s under no obligation to tell us.’
Was she transparent? Could everyone see she was hiding something? And if they could sniff out her lies, how long would it be before she was exposed? A welt of panic rose and she blushed. But Laurie dropped the questions and they spent the rest of the meal talking about the town and Sue and Laurie’s decision to retire by the sea.
Later, when Laurie left to play golf and Sue and Jo were alone, Sue said, ‘Laurie was a lawyer in another life. He can catch the whiff of a secret from the other side of the bay.’
They were still sitting on the balcony. The rain had stopped and the smell of damp grass wafted up the hill. A mist hung low to the ground, but the sky had transformed into a broad expanse of blue, with only a smear of the finest white clouds. Jo gazed out at the bay, the pier and the fishing boats, and the now clear outline of Melbourne. Her mother would arrive home to an empty house. She’d call out, frustrated and angry at the lack of response, until she discovered Jo gone. Mandy would be worried, of course, but she would be relieved too. Surely she would be relieved. ‘I don’t … I want to have a break.’
‘Sure,’ Sue said. ‘You can’t run forever, but sometimes we all need a break.’ She raised an eyebrow and smiled, and Jo knew she wouldn’t pursue the issue — at least not for now. ‘How about I take you to town and introduce you to Justin.’
While she followed Sue through the house and down the steps to the car, there was a moment when Jo thought about telling Sue everything. Mary went to confession regularly — she said it made her lighter. She said, God wipes the slate clean if you are truly sorry. Sue wasn’t God, but maybe God didn’t exist at all and priests were just ordinary men dressed in fancy clothes; maybe the lightness came from the act of confession itself.
But Jo didn’t tell Sue. No one could forgive what she’d done. Killing your best friend was unforgivable.
Sue took her to The George and introduced her to the manager, Justin, who was sitting drinking a beer and peering at an open laptop.
‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ Sue said.
Justin was much younger than Jo had expected. She guessed mid-twenties.
‘So Dad offered you a job,’ Justin said.
‘He suggested you might.’
Justin grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Portarlington is a small town. It’s the way things get done here. And I do need a waitress.’
Jo sat down opposite Justin. She was nervous, expecting him to ask for references or the names of past employers. She’d already decided she’d make an excuse for not having them — a stolen bag on the train. But Justin only asked her a few questions about her waitressing history. ‘Do you have a Responsible Service of Alcohol certificate?’
‘No, I’ve been working in a café and I didn’t serve alcohol,’ Jo lied, and wondered if she’d be allowed to work in a licensed restaurant without one. She did have an RSA — she’d completed the training earlier in the year — but she thought the police might have cancelled it and she didn’t want to take the risk.
‘It’s fine. You can help in the kitchen and serving the food. We’ll work around it. The barman usually looks after the drinks anyway. We’re so short-staffed at the moment, I need you. Fill in the employee details,’ he said, handing her the form. ‘If you can start tonight, that’d be great. I had to call one of the waitresses in and she’s struggling to find a sitter for her kids.’
‘Really? Tonight.’
‘Sure.’
‘I was expecting you’d want a CV, which I didn’t bring, and I lost my phone so I don’t have a phone number.’
‘It’s a waitressing job. If you drop plates on the customers’ laps we’ll have to let you go, otherwise no problem. But you will need a phone. You might be able to pick up a cheap one in Drysdale.’ He was grinning, taking pleasure in the moment, as if sitting talking to her were all he wanted to do, as if work were not stressful at all. Her shoulders dropped, the tension easing. Grandpa Tom as a young man might have looked like Justin: tanned and hair bleached blond from spending too much time in the sun. She couldn’t imagine Grandpa Tom wearing the bone earrings or leather strap bracelet around his wrist, but they suited Justin. ‘Come in at four, and I’ll show you around.’
On the way back to the hostel, Sue gave Jo a guided tour of the town centre, which wasn’t much more than the main shopping strip, made up mostly of cafés and restaurants. Jo said she needed a black skirt or pants and white shirt to wear to work and Sue took her to her favourite op shop, in a small garage that backed onto the car park at the rear of the shopping strip. The elderly woman behind the counter was leaning on a walker and chatting with a slightly younger woman, who was sorting through a box of recent book donations. Behind them, racks of clothes stretched the length of the shop. The women greeted Sue by name and she joined their conversation about the council proposal for controlling the jet-skiers over the summer.
Jo had spent her childhood in op-shop clothes, living with other children’s smells, their stains, their rips and tears. She hated it. As soon as she could afford to buy her own clothes, she refused to go into another op shop. But here, in a small change room, an old brown curtain drawn across, surrounded by the odours of other people’s lives — stale perfume and sweat — she could transform herself into a girl called Ashleigh, who worked in restaurant in a small country town by the sea, a world away from the girl who killed her best friend, the girl with an impending court case, who lived in a city where she was too scared to walk out the front door.
Chapter 22
It was ‘free-for-all’ night. That’s what the lawyers called the evening sessions they ran three nights a week. Anyone could come along and get free legal advice. They had three or four volunteers — law students and recent graduates — and one of the legal aid lawyers. There was a roster, as one of the permanent legal staff needed to be on the premises each night. For Sarah, that meant she was scheduled at least once a fortnight.
Sarah both hated and fought in defence of these nights. They were tough to organise, long and challenging, especially at the end of an already full work day. And they were busy. There was rarely time to reflect on anything. There were nights when the cases were straightforward — accumulated parking fines, shoplifting — but other times the cases were more complex, and on the same night they might give advice on a custody battle, a burglary conviction, what constitutes da
ngerous driving, whether a case of aggravated assault could result in jail time, and a dispute with a neighbour about a tree or a fence (there was always at least one of those). Solve what you can on the night was their motto. Those that couldn’t be dealt with became cases, and already the staff were overloaded with too many cases.
Tonight, a baby was crying in the waiting room, and the receptionist was trying to get Tanu, a regular, to take his cigarette outside.
‘It’s non-smoking in here,’ Sarah heard Helene say.
‘Nobody minds, do you?’ Tanu said. Sarah couldn’t see into the waiting room, but she knew Tanu was now swinging around, eyeballing everyone and daring them to object. Most people would turn away to avoid answering. The locals knew Tanu. He spent his days marching up and down the main street. Once he fixed his sights on someone, he was relentless.
‘Please, Tanu,’ Sarah heard Helene pleading, ‘you’ll get me into trouble.’
‘Okay, okay, for you, my lovely, because you asked me nice. Not many people are nice to me.’
Helene was in her mid-thirties, a local woman with two kids. Her husband ran the post office and coached the under-elevens footy team. Her mother volunteered at Vinnies Sunshine in Station Place. Her father, now dead, was a well-known trade unionist, active in the fight for compensation for the workers exposed to asbestos at the Wunderlich factory in Sunshine North. Everyone knew Helene and her family. She had a soft, childlike voice and a sweet smile, but she was a strong woman, and Sarah knew the pleading tone was a strategy. If she wanted to kick Tanu out, he would’ve already been on the street, and he knew it too.
Helene organised the bookings, and already she would have a queue at the counter.
‘I want to see the big woman lawyer.’ Big, fat, large: this is how clients described Sarah when they didn’t know her name. No one said obese. Most said big or large, unless they were angry with her, and then they called her fat — ‘Where’s that fat cow?’
She shouldn’t let it get to her. The clients who came into the office were usually facing some crisis. This was likely to be one of the worst times in their lives, and they were confronting prison or battling to keep their homes or their kids. And they described all of her colleagues by their physical failings — the bald guy, the guy with the scar — except, of course, for Lisa, who was the pretty one, and Alan, who was tall and, sometimes, tall and gorgeous. Unless he’d refused them something, and then he was a wanker or an up-himself wanker.
‘I want to see the woman, the big woman lawyer.’
‘Sarah.’
‘I don’t know her name, but you know who I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she here?’
‘Yes, I’ll put your name down to see her. Have a seat.’
‘Hi, my name’s Sarah Cascade.’ Sarah held out her hand and the woman shook it. Her now sleeping baby was strapped to her with a halter.
‘My mate Jody said I should see you. She said, “Go down to legal aid and see the fucking big sheila …” Sorry, it’s what she said. She said you is an ace lawyer, though. She said, “She’ll make the fucker pay” — sorry for the language — “make him wish he wasn’t born.”’ She was a tall woman; her long brown hair was dyed with streaks of purple and green. She had several teeth missing and bruises on both her arms. Unable to stand still, she bounced from side to side.
‘You can sit down,’ Sarah said.
The woman took the baby out and spread the halter on the floor, laying the sleeping baby on it. ‘When she’s asleep, she can sleep anywhere. Love the baby halter. Fell off the back of a truck, hey.’
‘What’s your name?’ Sarah frowned but ignored the woman’s comments about the stolen halter now on her floor.
‘Oh sure, sure. I’m Dawn, Dawn Angus. This is my baby Alberta. Stupid name, I know. Was his fucking idea. Fancy name. He said it’d give her a better start in life. I wanted to call her Stacey. I call her Bert, to stick it to him. Because fuck, he gives her a stupid bloody name and pisses off — won’t give me no money, says it’s not his baby, not his responsibility.’
‘Is she his baby?’
‘Bloody oath. He couldn’t get enough of me.’
‘Why does he think it’s not his baby?’
‘Says I was doing it with other blokes.’
‘But you’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you had a paternity test?’
‘A what?’
‘A test to see who the father is?’
‘What kind of test would that be?’
It took over half an hour for Sarah to work through the issues with Dawn and to start the process for a court order for the father to pay maintenance. Too long on a free-for-all night, with a waiting room full of other people. To the question of whether the father of the baby was abusive, Dawn didn’t reply. When Sarah asked the second time, Dawn said, ‘I come here for the child support. That’s all.’
‘Okay, but if he’s hurting you it’s wrong and you should go to the police.’
‘Just the child support,’ Dawn repeated. Sarah acquiesced and didn’t pursue the issue.
After Dawn, there was a guy with a dangerous driving charge — drag racing. Followed by an eviction. Two shoplifters. One had stolen a battery-operated dildo from a Sexyland store, and Sarah managed not to burst out laughing. Another driving charge. Followed by Tanu and his ongoing dispute with a neighbour.
It was only at the end of the night, on her way home, that she had a chance to think about Mandy’s phone call, and about Jo.
‘She’s run off.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She might need a little break.’
‘I’m worried.’
‘I’ll drop in tomorrow. We can talk about it.’
Sarah parked the car on the other side of Hyde Street and crossed Francis Street. The lights took so long to change, she considered running across. But she didn’t. The trucks, some of them three containers long, sped past. If she slipped or fell, always a possibility, she didn’t think they’d be inclined to stop for a fat jaywalking pedestrian.
Finally the lights turned green and Sarah crossed the road. Once at Mandy’s gate, she hesitated. She was spending too much time on this case — if she put her actual hours down on the weekly timesheet, her manager, Eric, would demand an explanation. But she hadn’t been putting down her actual hours; after all, some of it was in her own time, and she was sick of the way Eric wanted them to calculate every hour of their day as if they were some corporate law firm dealing with multimillion-dollar contracts.
Sarah rang the doorbell, and immediately Mandy opened the door. Her eyes were red, and it was obvious she’d been crying; she led Sarah through to the kitchen. There were dirty plates on the sink. On the table, the newspaper was still in its sealed roll. There was a basket of dirty laundry near the back door. ‘Sorry about the mess. I can’t seem to do anything this morning. I don’t …’
‘It’s okay,’ Sarah said. ‘You’re worried.’
Sarah suggested tea and Mandy made it.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Mandy said once the tea was made. ‘Since Jo left I can’t stand being in the house.’
The morning clouds had cleared and it was a sunny afternoon. Next door, Mandy’s neighbour mowed the lawn and the whiff of cut grass floated over the fence. In the distance, there was the non-stop drone of traffic.
‘Two days ago I came home from work and thought she wasn’t here,’ Mandy told Sarah. ‘I could tell straightaway the house was empty. I looked out the back window and she was sitting under the gum tree — so still. I went out there and asked her if she was okay. “I locked myself out,” is all she said. “You went out?” I said. I was surprised. But she didn’t answer, and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. She walked past me and went to her room. She hadn’t been out since the a
ccident — as far as I know.’
‘But you have no idea where she might have gone or why?’
‘No. That night we had dinner. Or I had dinner — I called her, but she didn’t come out of her room until later. I’d finished eating. I’d put her dinner away. She ate it cold. I tried a couple of times to have a conversation, but she didn’t respond. Yesterday, when I came home from work, she was gone. She left a note, saying she’s sorry and that she had to go. Telling me not to stress, she’ll be back. That she’ll let me know where she is in a few days.’ Mandy passed the note to Sarah and watched her read it. ‘That’s it. I tried to ring her, but there was no answer. Later, I found her phone on her bed.’
‘What did she take?’
‘Not much. Some clothes. A small backpack, I think.’
‘So long as she obeys the bail conditions, it’ll be fine. She shouldn’t leave the state, and she’ll need to let the police know she’s moved and her new address. And because she’s moved out of here, she’ll have to report to the police station once a week. Let’s wait a couple of days and see if she contacts you. If she doesn’t, we will have to tell the police.’
Mandy nodded. ‘I’m so worried.’
‘I know. If you hear from her, let me know. Get a number from her so I can talk to her.’
‘Her grandmother is in a panic. She thinks I should go looking for her.’
‘Where would you start looking?’
‘I don’t know. In the past whenever she’s run off, it’s been to Ashleigh’s.’
‘Let’s wait a couple of days. Time away might even help. I hope she finds somewhere to go that’ll give her a break. You know, in ancient Israel, they used to have several small cities outside the main city — they called them cities of refuge, and they sent people like Jo there.’
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