‘People like Jo — what does that mean?’
‘Sorry, I mean people who’d accidentally killed or injured someone. It was partly for their protection.’
‘Do you think Jo needs protection?’
Sarah thought about Ashleigh’s father at the window the day she dropped off the clothes. She thought about Ashleigh’s mother at Mandy’s doorstep. ‘No, I don’t think she needs protection, but getting away from Yarraville, for a while, might be good for her.’
‘It’s my fault she left. I can’t seem to … I feel like I fell out of love with Jo the night of the accident. I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone, more than I loved my mother, but it’s a memory, it’s gone, that obsessive, pure love, and I can’t seem to get it back. I don’t know how to love her anymore.’ Mandy was sobbing. ‘Jo knows. She looks at me, and she can see, she knows. That’s not supposed to happen.’
It seemed to Sarah that Mandy was stuck, like a rabbit in the hunter’s spotlight. She was stuck on her front doorstep on the night of the accident, overwhelmed with shame and anger that would not shift.
‘I’m sure you love Jo. You’re angry, you’re grieving, all those feelings are getting in the way,’ Sarah said. But in truth, she had puzzled over a parent’s ability to give unconditional love — especially when in the case of some of her clients, the child was cruel, ruthless, vicious.
‘I should’ve been glad to see she was alive and unhurt. She was alive, and she could’ve died. She came so close to dying. I should’ve run to her; instead, I didn’t want to go to the hospital at all. I should’ve held her like I did when she was a baby and fell out of the cot or fell over, and she would sob, and I’d hold her to my chest and everything would be alright again. Those moments, the warm smell, the press of her body into mine — it was everything. But I didn’t open my arms to catch her and she didn’t run to me. I didn’t hold her, I couldn’t make everything right again. I wanted to run away.’
‘You and Jo will work through this. It’s still so raw.’
‘The last four or five years she has been awful — she’s been such a bitch to live with. But I kept on loving her, supporting her … Driving drunk, the accident, was too much.’ Mandy paused. ‘I saw Ashleigh’s grandparents walking down the street yesterday. I was on the other side of the road. I hid around the corner. I told myself it’d be painful for them to see me. But I’m a coward. I’ve no idea what to say to them. What can I say? “I’m sorry my daughter killed your granddaughter?”’
‘Jo didn’t … you shouldn’t say “killed”, Mandy. It was an accident.’
‘The point is, I am ashamed. Ashamed of being Jo’s mother and ashamed of Jo. I can’t help it. I used to envy Rae. She’s so confident. Whenever I talked to her I felt like I was a child and she was the adult. Like I was back at school … like any moment she might tell me off for not behaving like a lady. I’m not saying — I mean, she was nice and friendly and good to Jo, and I was good to Ashleigh. She was a little stuck-up, Ashleigh, I mean, sometimes, but I was good to her …’
‘I’m sure you were, Mandy, you’re a kind person.’
‘No, sometimes I’m mean. Sometimes I was mean to the girls. They got on my nerves, so irresponsible. Now I’m constantly going back and forth between wishing I was nicer to them and regretting not being more of a tyrant, not putting my foot down. Not stopping them. I should’ve stopped Jo from taking the car … I didn’t even try. I didn’t even say, “If you’re going to drink, don’t drive.” I could’ve given them taxi money.’
‘If we had the foresight, we’d all do things differently, but we don’t. None of us knows what is around the corner.’ Sarah hated platitudes, but she didn’t know what else to say. Why hadn’t Mandy — sensible Mandy, who she’d grown to like — why hadn’t she said anything? Why didn’t she take the car keys and stop her daughter from driving?
‘I heard a story,’ Mandy said, ‘of a man who was driving when he noticed the car in front of him was swerving from lane to lane and even into the gutter. The driver was drunk or drugged or falling asleep, so when they stopped at the lights, the man jumped out, ran over to the car in front, and knocked on the window, and, when the driver rolled down his window, he reached in and took the key and threw it as hard and as far as he could. And then he jumped back into his car and drove away without looking back. He probably saved a couple of lives that day.’
‘You have to stop blaming yourself, Mandy. It doesn’t help either of you. Let’s hope you hear from her in the next day or two,’ Sarah said. ‘Try not to worry before then.’ Sarah put down her cup and picked up her handbag. She hated to leave Mandy like this, but she was running late for her next appointment with a new client, a young man charged with drug dealing. He’d been caught outside a local school and his parents were in a panic. And there were only so many hours she could fudge before Eric would notice.
On her second day in Portarlington, Laurie and Sue drove her to Drysdale and she bought a cheap phone. She sent her mother a text letting her know that she was okay. Five minutes later, there was a call from a number she didn’t recognise. She ignored it. A minute on, a text: It’s Sarah Cascade. I need to talk to you now.
Jo hesitated before pressing ‘call’.
Sarah wasn’t angry. ‘I need to know where you are. It’s part of the bail conditions. The police need to be notified of your new address, and you’ll need to go to the police station and report to them.’
Jo told Sarah where she was staying. ‘Please don’t tell my mother. I don’t want her or my grandmother to come.’
‘They’re worried.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry, but I’m fine. I need a break. I can’t be at home at the moment.’
‘You need to talk to your mother.’
‘I can’t, not now.’
‘Okay, well, you’re an adult. It’s your choice. But you need to promise me that you’ll send your mother a text every couple of days to let her know you’re okay, can you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you need to promise that if I ring and tell you to come home, you’ll come home. Court dates can be shifted with little notice.’
‘I promise.’
‘Okay.’
‘Can I work? I have a job in a restaurant.’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
‘I don’t want anyone to know … I mean, will the police here tell people?’
‘No, as long as you stay out of trouble.’
On her way to The George, Jo went to the police station. Nervous and shaking, she reported to the front counter. They were expecting her, and they had her sign a form with the date. Of course she signed Jo Neilson. Would they find out she was using Ash’s name?
When Sarah walked, she watched her feet, waiting to avoid a fall. When she walked, she saw only what was caught in her peripheral vision, in side glances. She looked up momentarily in reaction to a car horn or a shout, to follow the smell of curry or pho, to move around oncoming pedestrians. She should wear a neon sign above her head — obese woman walking — so people knew to avoid her.
Even though she walked regularly, she didn’t lose weight. You walk too slowly, her mother said, and without purpose. It was true Sarah didn’t power walk like other women; their determined striding made her wince. They circled the botanical gardens, and sometimes even the streets of the city, in pairs, with leg and arm weights. She did wear her runners, and sometimes she took her iPod. But no matter what she did, she would never look like them. She walked because walking was how she thought, how she found her way around life. If she didn’t walk, she became stressed and overly anxious and smoked and ate too much. Besides, her one-bedroom apartment was tiny. And the balcony was narrow — no room for a table, just one chair and one plant, a tall prickly cactus that survived both her lack of care and the city smog.
On the street, she was part of the city, not alon
e. As she strolled, she looked in windows. Sometimes she went into shops, or through parks. Sometimes she walked in circuits around the city centre. Occasionally she ventured down to Southbank, making her way along the Yarra towards the casino. The river, brown and thick, was a long stretch lined with restaurants and bars. She liked the city best at dusk, when the lights came on and the river reflected the city back on itself, when people transformed into indistinguishable silhouettes and holograms.
She thought about the phone call with Jo earlier that afternoon, and her reluctance to ring her mother. She liked Mandy; they were becoming friendly. It was the first time since Ada died and Laine left that Sarah had felt the possibility of friendship. But Mandy was Jo’s mother, and Jo was a client. She’d considered passing Jo on to one of the other lawyers, but that felt like a betrayal of both mother and daughter. And it wasn’t, Sarah told herself, as if she was sleeping with her client, which had happened before in the office — though not to her, of course. It wasn’t even as if she was socialising with Jo or Mandy, not really; she and Mandy just talked. Mostly they talked about Jo and the accident, but increasingly they were confiding intimacies, stories and dreams. And Sarah had warned Mandy that Jo would likely go to prison and there was nothing she could do to prevent it, so it wasn’t as if she was making false promises or setting herself up as some great lawyer who could perform miracles.
‘There are lines,’ an old boss had said once, when they discovered one of the lawyers they worked with was having a relationship with an ex-client. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to see where the lines are, other times the lines are clear but people ignore them.’
Sarah turned into Flinders Street and headed down towards the station. It was dark now, and the streets were busy. In Federation Square, there was a band playing jazz, their images projected on the large screen. A crowd had gathered, some standing, some sitting on steps and on the ground, others lounging in deckchairs. A group of children danced and laughed and chased one another in circles. Sarah crossed at Swanston Street, walked past Young and Jackson, and headed down to Elizabeth Street.
Outside Lord of the Fries, two teenage boys stood smoking and drinking. ‘Look at that fat lump,’ one boy said as she approached, loud enough for her to hear. ‘She’s bigger than your sister.’
‘Shut the fuck up about my sister, arsehole.’
Both boys laughed. In their tight jeans, their legs were twig-thin. Sarah blushed and walked faster.
‘Hey, you,’ the boy with the sister shouted. ‘You should try going on The Biggest Loser.’
‘Hey, loser,’ the other one screamed after her. ‘They’d reject you ’cause you’re so ugly.’
They laughed again. Sarah bent her head down and watched her feet persistently. They weren’t following, but their voices were like heavy hands on the base of her spine, pushing her forwards. She remembered being with Ada once, long ago, when they were in their teens. A couple of boys much like these had called her names — fatso and fat face and ugly bitch. They were on a gravel path, and Ada had picked up a handful of rocks and thrown them at the boys, yelling, dickheads, fuckwits, arseholes. The boys had run away, laughing and calling them ugly bitches. Ada chased after them. But Sarah, terrified, called her back.
To shake the boys’ voices, to shake Ada’s disapproval, to shake her own shame at her lack of courage, she quickened her pace and crossed Flinders Lane. She was almost at Bourke Street before she slowed down again. In front of a judge and a jury, acting on behalf of her clients, she was strong and articulate, but on the street, she could so easily be reduced and belittled by a couple of drunk adolescent boys. It wasn’t her body she was ashamed of, it was her inability to ignore the judgements and abuse, and to stop those judgments and that abuse interfering in her life.
To keep herself from spiralling into useless self-pity, she refocused her thoughts on Jo and Mandy. Jo was going to prison. None of them, Mandy, Mary, or Jo, were prepared for the moment when the judge handed down the sentence. None of them were prepared for being in the courtroom with Ashleigh’s family, or the fact that their very presence would put pressure on the judge to hand down the longest possible sentence. For Ashleigh’s family, no sentence would be long enough, and of course for Mandy and Mary, any sentence was too long.
Chapter 23
Portarlington was the quintessential sleepy town, even in the lead-up to Christmas and the holidays. Jo fell into an easy routine. In the morning she woke up early and went for a long walk along the Esplanade towards St Leonards. This way she avoided the other residents in the dorm. She was also worried about Laurie and Sue, whom she was finding herself gravitating towards as if they were her own grandparents. They were generous with their invitations to lunch and dinner on her days off. They invited her to go with them on their weekly shopping trip to Geelong and their occasional excursions to ocean beaches and wineries. But with the increasing intimacy, the guilt of what she was keeping from them, of the lies she was telling them, festered like a persistent sore.
Once a week she went to the police station, early in the morning when there weren’t many people around. She signed in, and they rarely asked her questions. She thought about her mother and her grandmother, whose text messages and voicemails she answered with brief replies: I’m fine, all good. Yes, I am eating — looking after myself. And she thought about prison and what her life might be like after that. Her mood varied from day to day. There were times when she could walk to the water and smile at the joggers and dog walkers, at the workman building and renovating houses on the Esplanade, go for a swim in the bay and think only about Portarlington and her present life — doing her laundry, updating the specials board at the restaurant, helping Sue with pulling some ivy off the back fence.
‘When you’re young,’ Sue had said to her one day, ‘you think about all the things you want to do. To achieve. You want to be famous. Or you want to change the world. But the years go by and the things you haven’t done don’t matter anymore. You’re happy to plant a garden and watch it grow.’
There were some days when Jo convinced herself that she could go on living, and go on living this life, a day-to-day existence, like so many of the people around her. Granted, most of them were retired, but here it seemed possible to work, to garden, to walk, to eat and sleep, to repeat the whole thing again the next day and the day after. To live without aspiring to anything in particular, without planning for the future. But there were also the mornings after sleepless nights when Ash’s voice invaded and wouldn’t stop — You can’t keep pretending to be me. You’ve stolen my name. How long are you going to keep it up? — when she thought about suicide again. When the desire not to be alive was urgent, and she stood at the end of the pier and imagined disappearing into the blue water, sinking into a peaceful, dreamless sleep. On those days, work provided relief. Often she worked both the lunch and the dinner shift, and volunteered to help clean up in the kitchen, to close up at the end of the night.
Jo and Justin worked the same shifts, so they often ate lunch together in the kitchen or on the balcony. A couple of times during her breaks, when she crossed the road and sat on the grass overlooking the bay, he came across and sat with her. They talked about Portarlington, mainly. Justin told her the bay produced most of the mussels consumed in the state, and that mussels had grown in these waters for centuries — there was lots of evidence that long before white settlement, the Wathaurong people fished here for mussels as well as other fish. Jo had seen people lined up to buy them off the boats at the end of the pier. At The George, mussels were always on the menu.
Justin told her the story of William Buckley, the escaped convict who lived around the area with the Wathaurong people for thirty-two years. He told her about the vineyards and the olive groves. He talked about his love of fishing. He told her he’d moved back to Portarlington after his mother died, to keep his father company. But she could see how connected he was to the place, to the preservation of its
environment, to the acknowledgement of its Indigenous history. He was not an activist like Ian Williams: this was his home, where he belonged, and he would simply do his best to take care of it. Around him she found herself noticing the shape of the bay, the colour of the water, the species of trees.
Justin felt solid and comfortable. He did ask her personal questions, but he didn’t press her when she didn’t answer. She told him about Grandpa Tom and his stories. She told him about her house in Yarraville, across the road from the oil terminal, down the road from the refineries, and her fear that her mother would sell it and move and the house would no longer be theirs.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘I lived in the west when I lived in Melbourne, in Sunshine. Most people couldn’t wait to get out. Don’t you worry about living so close to the refineries?’
‘No,’ she told him. ‘You get used to it.’
From their vantage point, they could see the beach populated by shade tents and domes, by sunbathers and swimmers, by squealing children and the rumble of jetski motors and fishing boats.
‘When I was a kid, I used to point to the signs — Dangerous, Explosive — and my mother would avoid explaining, try to change the subject, until one day, she was frustrated with my questions, and she said, “It means the whole place could blow up. One big fireball.”’
‘Gosh, did it freak you out?’ Justin asked.
‘It must’ve. I remember worrying we’d catch fire and our house would burn down. Mum tried to take it back, and said, “We’ll run like the wind until we’re far, far away.” But after that, I had these repeating fire dreams: great walls of flames roaring towards the house.’
‘There was an explosion once, on Coode Island,’ Justin said.
‘I didn’t find out about the Coode Island fire until I was older. Apparently the smoke choked the neighbourhood and people were evacuated from their houses and schools and businesses. I was a baby when it happened and we were living in Braybrook. Mum said my grandfather was evacuated. He spent a couple of days on our couch in the flat. She told me Grandpa Tom used to say, “Lucky the wind was blowing towards the city that day, towards those rich bastards.”’
The Bridge Page 31