‘Then what do you want, Ashley?’
‘I want you to be honest with me.’
‘I am,’ Sally stressed.
Ashley turned her head away so that she was looking at the open door into the bathroom. ‘Did you fuck him?’ she asked.
‘What? Fuck who?’
‘That guy you saw last night,’ Ashley said, still facing away. ‘That guy I practically had to drag you away from. You were so into him, I could tell.’
‘Charlie?’
‘Yeah. That weirdo.’
‘Are you crazy, Ashley? What are you even talking about?’
‘You’d rather fuck some guy like that than spend time with me?’
‘You were the one actually having sex with someone, in this very room.’
‘That’s not true,’ Ashley said. ‘You never think of what I want.’
‘I do. I always do.’
Ashley took a deep breath. ‘You need to get over what happened,’ she said.
Sally folded her arms. She knew what Ashley was saying, but wanted to hear it from her. ‘Get over what?’ she asked, already knowing the answer, but she wanted Ashley to say it. She dared her.
‘Your Dad dying. People die. It’s terrible, but that’s what happens. But the thing is you’re acting like it never happened, and you’re so affected by it. You’re ignoring it all. Why do you think Mum and Dad have paid for this holiday? It’s for you to get over it, you’re so stuck in the past. You need to get over it and learn from it. You need to move on with your life.’
‘Don’t talk to me about Dad,’ Sally replied.
‘I have to, Sally.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘I have to talk about him because you’re not. You haven’t. You never talk about him. It was always up to you if you wanted to open up, but you never did. And I was there for you, through it all. But you are denying everything that happened. You’re acting like nothing affected you, but I can see it did, I’m your best friend, Sally. Of course, I saw you in pain.’
‘Stop it.’
‘And I offered to help so many times. I suggested that grief counsellor you went to only once. I was there for you the whole time, but you’ve neglected me. You’ve never seen beyond yourself. You always run away.’
This was too far, Ashley had tipped Sally off the edge.
‘I don’t need you,’ Sally replied. ‘I don’t need your parents’ money thrown at me. I’m not a problem to be solved.’
She’d never spoken to Ashley like this, but she didn’t want to listen to her attacks. Not now.
Again, Ashley went quiet. She resumed playing with her phone, unlocking it and scrolling aimlessly through her emails before turning it off again. Sally sat there on the side of the bed, watching her friend. They’ve never argued like this before. The space between Ashley and her was widening. She could see the gulf forming between them. She felt distant from her friend. It was the most distant they’d ever been.
She studied Ashley’s face, and she was reminded of home and all the pain back there. Her past. Ashley resembled all that pain. All the well-wishers and friends trying to contact her after the Funeral. The pity. She never wanted to go back there. She wanted to stay here, in this country on the other side of the world. She didn’t want to go back home. Sally hated it there. Right now, sitting on the bed, she hated Ashley.
‘I regret coming to this country with you,’ Ashley eventually said, her voice trembling.
Sally shook her head in shock. Using her hands, which gripped the bed cover in a tight fist, she lifted herself off Ashley’s bed and sat on her own. She rotated so that only her back was facing her friend, her face concealed. She didn’t want Ashley to observe any part of her. She didn’t want her to see how her words affected Sally, how much they were like a venom burrowing under her skin. She wanted to cry. ‘I don’t even care that you regret coming here with me, I don’t care because I’ve got other plans,’ Sally said.
‘What other plans?’
‘I’m going into the bush. Hiking.’
‘Good luck. I won’t be coming with you.’
Sally turned around. Ashley was still staring off into the bathroom. ‘You were never invited,’ she said.
Ashley sighed. ‘You know what?’
Sally wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘What?’
‘Fuck you.’
Sally was taken aback by her friend’s savagery. ‘Fuck you,’ she said in return almost immediately. The words were like vomit spewing from her guts. Instinctive.
Ashley buried her face in her sleeve, wiping tears away from her eyes. Ashley stood and walked to the bathroom. ‘Okay. Good. I’m glad,’ she said as she opened the bathroom door. She bent over and heaved out something from the bathroom, something she'd hidden inside. Her travelling bag. ‘That’s it. That’s the final straw.’
‘Why do you have your bag?’ Sally asked.
Ashley didn’t look back at her. ‘I’m going, Sally,’ she said.
‘You’re going? Where?’
‘I’m staying with Jim.’
‘For how long?’ Sally knew the question was stupid, that she sounded emotional. Ashley had hidden her bag inside the bathroom to create a dramatic effect, and it had worked. She’d won the emotional game. Sally wanted her friend to stay, but it was too late now. The gulf between them was untraversable.
‘How long? I’ve booked a flight home,’ Ashley replied.
‘You can’t be serious,’ Sally said.
‘I am. This has been the last straw. I’m flying home in two days.’ Ashley dropped her bag and pointed her finger at Sally. Tears streamed down her face. ‘Bloody hell. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry in front of you.’ She unclipped her bag so she could freely wheel it out of the room.
‘You’re leaving now?’ Sally asked.
‘Yes, and don’t you dare follow me,’ Ashley said as she left the hotel room, slamming the door in one last act of retribution. A moment passed. The room was silent.
Sally fell on her bed, and her hand reached for a pillow. She raised it over her face, smothering herself in the soft material. The pillow muffled her voice as she started to scream. The back of her throat strained with her anger and pain.
She imagined Ashley walking down that hostel corridor to the lifts. Sally could run out now and call her back. But she didn’t want to.
It felt like she’d cut a cord with everything that had happened in the past few weeks. All the pain within Sally had left with Ashley. But Sally didn’t feel anything new, no happiness or joy or hope. She felt nothing, a droning numbness.
Ashley was gone.
Sally lay on her bed for the next hour. It was like she was outside of her body, floating above herself. The past few days being in this country repeated themselves like a loop, a blur of conversations, phones, cigarette smoke, alcohol, sunshine and smiles.
What was she doing here? What was she doing in this country? What was she doing in this hostel on the other side of the world from home?
The Funeral. The memory she didn’t want to have, that she didn’t want to keep, returned. It’d been only a month ago. She was standing at the old church, the same church she’d been baptised at as a baby. People were milling in the church. The service had ended. Someone came up to her. They were saying sad things, consoling things. The former students who told her her Dad was the best teacher they’d had. Sally nodded, but she wasn’t listening. The coffin lying in the church. He was in there. Dad.
Next to the coffin was a framed photo. She picked it up. It was him, smiling towards the camera. This used to be on a shelf in her living room. Another photo was of a garden in summer. Her Dad, topless with his pale skin glistening in the sun, was also grinning in this photo. His daughter was perched on his shoulders, holding tight around the top of his head. Sally was just a kid then. The photo was taken before Mum left, their last summer together.
Sally gripped her face and forced the memory out of her head.
She was back in the hostel room, and
the arrow necklace was wrapped around her neck, almost strangling her. It must’ve become tangled when she screamed into the pillow.
Her Dad was gone. Ashley was gone.
And Ashley was wrong. She could argue all she liked about having been there for Sally, but Sally didn’t need her. She never did. Ashley was, to Sally, a sad and twisted walking reminder of home and all the pain back home.
She picked herself off the bed and stumbled into the bathroom. She was winded, like the fight with Ashley was a boxing match. And she’d lost.
She checked herself over in the mirror and immediately regretted doing so. Her face was red, her cheeks puffy, and her eyes were bloodshot. In disgust at her appearance, she turned off the bathroom light, sat on the toilet, and wiped her nose.
Maybe she should drink. Fuck it.
She pulled her phone out. The screen’s light blinked at her, illuminating the dark bathroom in a garish whiteness. She flicked through her Instagram feed. It was the usual bullshit, and it made her feel even worse. No sign of Ashley on there.
She clicked over to her contacts. Her thumb hovered over Charlie's number. She hesitated.
She wanted to get out of here, out of the city.
‘You’re an idiot,’ she said to herself. ‘What are you doing?’
Ignoring herself, Sally’s thumb pressed down on his name, and she began to type a message.
29
Sally’s last memory of the night before had been of her reaching into her bag to find the small bottle of vodka she’d stored there in secret. She remembered the taste, the fiery sharp taste of the clear liquid. The next morning she didn’t even remember how she’d fallen asleep.
The vodka bottle had been a mistake. She’d kept it secret from Ashley. She'd kept the bottle secret all the way from home, on the flight and into the hostel room. Fuck. She was drinking as heavily as her mum had done when she last saw her years ago. Her Dad had been right. She was like her mother. A fucking drinker. It’d been easier to drink than to deal with her insecurities and problems. It’d always been easier to run away.
And now she was hungover.
Sally limped out of bed, careful not to move too fast in case of further encouraging the pain, and lurched into the hostel shower. She turned the taps on to full blast, accepting the hot water like a religious experience, hoping it’ll help her present condition. But afterwards, when she was dry heaving into the toilet, wet and naked, it was pretty clear to her the shower hadn’t helped at all.
When her stomach was less turbulent, she stumbled back into the room and packed her bag. What she was doing was less packing and more like throwing all her things into the bag in a chaotic pile. Her mind couldn’t deal with order, or even thinking clearly, at the moment.
Ashley was gone.
She hauled her bag around her shoulder, took one last look at the room, and closed the door. She made her way down the hallway and into the lift. As she checked out of the hostel she tried to ignore the foyer spinning.
The late morning sun greeted her as the hostel doors opened, and she staggered outside, careful not to accidentally hit anyone behind her with her bag. A couple wandering out of the cafe next door had to skirt around her. Sally apologised to them and adjusted her eyes to the brightness outside. There were plenty of cars parked beside the pavement. She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hands and checked up and down the street, searching for him.
‘Hello, Sally.’ On the other side of the road, Charlie was leaning on a car. He was smiling.
‘Yeah. So. I changed my mind,’ she said.
Charlie wasn’t hungover. Like always, he appeared the same, as if no time had passed since Sally had seen him at the harbour. He wore his black leather jacket, his face was still unshaven and his curly hair predictably messy. He spun his car keys around one finger. What a show off.
He nodded towards the packed backpack around her shoulders. ‘Oh, I can see you’ve changed your mind,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you’d get my message in time.’ She tightened her bag’s straps and marched to the car. ‘Thanks for inviting me, sorry if I’m a bit late,’ she said.
‘No need to thank me,’ Charlie said as helped her to remove the backpack from around her shoulders. ‘Let me take this off you.’ With a grunt, he fitted the bag into the boot of the car. The vehicle was not what Sally expected. She’d expected something new or rented, but Charlie's car was old, and it hadn’t been cleaned for a long time. It had dirt marks running along the side. ‘God, your bag is pretty heavy.’
‘Nice car you have there,’ Sally remarked.
‘Hey, don’t knock her. She’s a beauty, and she’s reliable. She’s got me out of some tricky situations in the past,’ he said.
‘I hope she can make it down the street.’
‘If you’re going to be like that, maybe you shouldn’t come,’ Charlie said.
‘You’re gonna have to tell me where we’re going first.’
He shut the car boot. ‘That’s for you to wait and see, Sally. Trust me.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘You want to sit up front?’ he asked.
‘I’ll prefer the back.’ There was more space in the back, and she wanted to lean against the window, a higher chance to steady her nervous hungover stomach.
Charlie reached over and opened the door for her.
‘Very chivalrous,’ Sally remarked.
‘I am a gentleman.’
Charlie skipped around the car to the driver’s seat and started the engine with a flick of his keys. The car groaned to life, and the whole thing vibrated, it was that flimsy.
Sally rested her forehead against the car window and the city darted past in a whirl of colours. Outside the window, tall glass buildings of the city centre rose up until they gave way to the grey concrete highway. Unlike the outside of the car, the inside was spotless. The seat leather was unmarked, and the floor vacuumed. Sally reckoned it must’ve been cleaned vigorously. Recently. Charlie must've done it for her.
‘You’re going to love hiking,’ he said, his hands threaded the steering wheel as they changed lanes. The car chugged along, a rambling wreck. Sally doubted it was safe to be on the highway in this thing, but Charlie didn’t seem to mind at all, he guided the car down the highway at top speed. They passed trucks and lorries at a dangerously close distance. Sally gripped the armrest. ’It’s beautiful out here.’
‘I’m sure I will love it.’
‘This is the real country,’ he said proudly.
Finally, the city was behind her. Ashley was somewhere back there, in among the office blocks and affluent suburbia. She was somewhere back there with Jim. Sally didn’t know where he lived. She might have it saved on her phone somewhere, or in the notes her and Ashley had prepared together before they left home. A lifetime ago when they’d sat around Ashley’s family kitchen table, and wrote down everything they needed for the trip. But she didn’t need to remember that now. She needed to stop thinking about her friend. She might cry if she did, and no way was she going to cry in front of Charlie. Ashley had left, and now Sally was leaving. She took comfort in watching the green and brown colour of the bush flash past as Charlie drove deeper and deeper into the country. Away from the city.
The hangover was getting worse.
‘Stop the car,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Stop the car.’ Sally’s head was spinning, worse than in the hostel foyer. And now her stomach was also spinning. It was a warning. She could already taste the sick in her throat.
‘I can’t do that. I’m on the highway.’
‘I’m going to be sick, Charlie.’
‘Shit. Okay.’ The car lurched to the left as Charlie aimed for the side of the road. He hadn’t even come to a stop when Sally opened the door and leapt to the gravel. She bent over the grass, her back arched as she heaved up her hangover and all the alcohol from the night before. She closed her eyes to avoid looking at it.
‘You alright?’
Charlie asked.
‘No.’ It was all she could say before another wave hit her and she doubled back over herself, attempting to avoid any sick from projecting on to her clothes.
Charlie waited by the car for her to finish the roadside spewing. He tried to pat her on her back. She snarled at him, and so he stood on the other side of the car, giving Sally a sense of dignity. She shouldn’t have had that secret bottle of vodka. Sally knew she had a problem.
‘Here you go,’ he said as he handed her a full water bottle once she’d made her way back to the car.
‘Thanks,’ Sally replied gulping it down. The cool water removed the acid taste from her mouth. ‘Sorry for being so aggressive just then, throwing up isn’t the most graceful thing to do.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve all been there,’ he replied.
‘It’s your fault anyway, you were the one who brought me to that party last night.’
‘Hey, I didn’t make the drinks,’ Charlie said, chuckling.
Sally took another long sip from the water bottle. She wiped her mouth and sighed. ‘Thanks for stopping the car,’ she said.
‘That was more for my benefit. I don’t want sick all over my seats.’
‘By the looks of it, your car has had worse.’
‘That is enough of that. She’s my beauty,’ Charlie said.
‘Do you have a mint or something? I don’t want to have bad breath,’ Sally said.
‘What, are you planning on kissing someone,’ Charlie joked. He immediately realised the awkwardness of what he’d suggested and darted his hands towards his pockets, fishing for a mint packet. Sally looked away, worried about her expression. She hoped she seemed calm. She remembered the night before, on the balcony, when they were so close they nearly kissed. ‘I think I have one. I’m a typical smoker, always need to have an emergency stash of mints,’ he added, embarrassed, and he passed her a mint.
‘Thanks,’ Sally said, putting it in her mouth. She was blushing, but she didn’t know whether it was out of infatuation or embarrassment.
‘Are you ready to go?’ Charlie asked. Sally was relieved to get back into the car, to put the awkward roadside stop behind her.
The Busker: A gripping psychological thriller Page 16