by Kate Ryan
‘Positive. Aggie told me. They found things. Matches. She didn’t exactly cover her tracks.’
Then she heard her mother say bad influence, and she got up from her desk and slammed her door. She remembered the words, the infantile anger, the quests. Get Eli to drop us at Mumbulla Falls for the night, camp there. Tell no one else we are going. Slide down into enter the pool three times and swim the circumference. A few more words were scribbled out. ‘You need to say something about it being the final initiation,’ Jessie said, bossy, snappy, taking charge again.
Ali could have written anything, but she did her job at this point. This quest will be the last one we will carry out before we both turn thirteen.
‘Read out the last bit,’ Jessie had said. After the final quest all evidence will be erased. The Golden Book will be destroyed.
The other thing she wrote after one of their last big fights, all in a row, like lines for detention. I hate her I hope she dies I hate her I hope she dies I hate her I hope she dies I hate her I hope she dies I hate her I hope she dies I hate her I hope she dies.
They had been sitting on Ali’s verandah. Sun on the armchairs they had pushed out there, drinking Cokes through straws. Jessie started blowing bubbles, and both of them were laughing at first, Ali getting up and moving out of range as Jessie spat further further further, onto herself and the wooden floor of the verandah, running at Ali, filling her cheeks with Coke and spurting it out, flaying her arms out from her sides. Then the Coke was splattering over the chairs, and she thought of her mum, how she loved those chairs, and of her gran being sick, dying, and she yelled at her, ‘Jessie, stop it, you idiot! You’re wrecking them! You’re wrecking the chairs!’
Jessie didn’t stop.
Bubbles of brown spit spraying out, and laughter, and her big pale mouth split open until she fell on the floor, arms and legs splayed out like a crucifixion, and all the Coke gone.
Ali was growing tired of her. She wanted to move away.
Ali listened for a moment for noise from her parents’ room. Nothing. What did any of it matter? The words. More and more words. Jessie could never have read any of them.
38
The first time she went back to see Jessie again, as a twenty-year-old, it was a very hot day, nearly forty degrees. Everyone was talking about it — off the charts for this time of year, a record. Ali had walked in from the blazing street into icy air-conditioning. When she found her, Jessie was sitting in a wheelchair at the window, sweat visible on her freckled upper lip. The size of her; round white arms, wreaths of flesh around her chin. For a second, she had the terrible feeling that it was not really her. A white blind was bumping against the window, the air-con making it move. A nurse was feeding her microwaved quiche, soft, pale, the stench of egg. She didn’t look up as Ali came in, said, ‘She’s done well.’ Jessie made a half-grunt, and Ali had to look away as the nurse wiped her mouth, picked up the plate and left the room.
Ali made herself sit. ‘Hi, Jessie,’ she whispered.
Nothing. She had been told to expect nothing and that was it. Nothing.
‘It’s me.’
Jessie grimaced and her head dropped to the side. Her eyes closed.
Ali had concocted a romantic plan to read The Arabian Nights, and she held the book tightly on her lap. The noise of the ward went on — trolleys, the side of a bed being raised, the wrench of a curtain, cheerful voices, the TV from the lounge. She sat. Dribble appeared at the corner of Jessie’s mouth, but Ali couldn’t wipe it away. She felt her heart beating hard as she got up and left like a thief.
She went every day that week. Each day the fear of running into someone — Cal most of all — increased, but as if it were penance, she continued. Sometimes Jessie was asleep, or her eyes were open, staring at nothing. Nurses came and went. Sometimes she would be parked in front of the TV in the communal lounge. The Monet prints in their ugly frames, the old people’s bent-over figures, the swollen, lumpy legs, the birthday party Ali saw with streamers and cakes with fake cream, the whiskery chins and the walking frames. But the worst of it was that in all of that, there was life. In Jessie there was none.
Even so, that first day she had wanted to say something. She moved her lips, but nothing came out. She wanted a last special word for her. She tried to think of it. The right word. Desolation. Regret. Devastation. The French with their particular poetry. Jessie, she wanted to say, je suis desolée.
‘Aggie’s completely devoted,’ Diane had told her. ‘She goes every day.’
Ali imagined her wheeling Jessie around the manicured gardens of the home and the quiet edges of town. The fact that they were together so much now seemed wrong. It wouldn’t have been possible if Jessie was still the person she had been.
Aggie said it clearly when she ran into her at the home a few days later. ‘She’s a shell.’ She tapped the side of her head, and Ali was stricken. ‘Nothing there.’ The familiar chopstick was still stuck jauntily in Aggie’s grey-black hair, but she had filled out, and there was a smattering of age spots on the back of her hands. A few heavy lines scored her cheeks, and she wore cheap Velcro sandals showing her gnarled toenails. They sat for a while. Aggie said she heard about her from Diane, and Ali nodded, saying she was back for a while, taking time out. Aggie smiled suddenly and looked at her with attention for the first time, her expression warm. ‘Not seeing Eli any more?’
Ali blushed and shook her head. In all the time she’d been with Eli she had never been aware of him talking to Aggie about her, but really, she’d had no idea.
Aggie smiled. ‘He’s a silly boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you.’ She held Ali’s arm, and Ali felt pulled in again. ‘Don’t do it on her behalf.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s nice of you to come, sweetie, but there’s really no point. You don’t need to. She doesn’t know anyone. I have to come, but you don’t. It doesn’t make any difference.’
Aggie didn’t appear to notice Ali’s discomfort. She had plonked herself down next to Jessie, and now she took out something she was knitting from a plastic freezer bag. ‘For Cal’s little one. The red hair’s popped up again, would you believe?’
Ali nodded and tried to work out a way to extricate herself. A final meaningful word. Not that Aggie required it. It was her peculiar gift to be completely immune to the force of others’ feelings. Or so Ali believed. She stood up. ‘I’ll go then.’
Aggie looked up and smiled. ‘Bye, hon.’ She seemed perfectly happy — not tortured, not grief-stricken, not numb with horror. It occurred to Ali that it was the most contented she had ever seen her in Jessie’s company.
39
Ali drove to Tathra. It was a kind of delay. It was still and hot on the beach, the sun a hazy circle under cloud, but she didn’t swim because the water was awash with algal bloom, shifting, muddy. A couple of little kids, maybe eight and ten, were laughing and running from the shallows, their legs covered with a blackish film. Their mother held out two towels and scolded, ‘That’s silly. I told you not to go in.’
Ali walked past them across the beach, up the steps to the cliff path. The clouds had scattered now and the sky was big and open, faintly mottled; the ocean was dark with treacherous-looking patches. She kept going along the path, emerging at the road and walking down the wharf to the end. A couple of men had set up folding chairs to fish, and they nodded at Ali as she passed. On the other side of the wharf, a sign had been attached to the railing, and Ali walked over to read it. It was a memorial to two children, aged four and eighteen months, their father aged 34, all drowned.
She turned away and walked back into the café overlooking the water. There were packing cases for seats and an array of rickety tables. In one corner was an old-fashioned school desk, where two girls around Tam’s age sat drawing. Ali felt an ache of longing to see her. She found a seat facing the water, and a waitress with olive skin and a Māori gre
enstone necklace took her order.
When Ali asked her about the algal bloom, she laughed. ‘Never seen anything like it. People are coming out of the water completely coated.’ She shivered dramatically. ‘You’re not getting me in there.’
Ali smiled, and the waitress moved away to make her coffee. She watched the other waitress, blonde and tiny in a green, spotted dress, carry coffee out to the fisherman on a cardboard tray. She took small, precise steps. Near the memorial, two small boys were kneeling at the edge of the wharf and looking directly into the water, while their parents chatted to the fishermen.
Ali had arranged to drop in on Aggie. Diane had her number, and instead of calling Ali texted, receiving an immediate reply. Of course, darling. Come for coffee in the morning, say 10.30.
It was a neat little unit, one of four in a pale-brick block. There was a birdbath in the front garden, a square of grass framed with white pebbles.
‘Darling.’ Aggie pulled her into an embrace at the front door, her soft cheek smelling of roses.
She led her into a small, tidy living room with a blue couch and a couple of floral armchairs. There was a bookshelf with a few rows of books. Family photos lined the top: various smiling children; a close-up of Jessie looking uncharacteristically angelic, perhaps six or seven, red hair haloed around her face, a candle and a Bible next to it.
Ali looked away. She thought of Aggie’s market stalls: shopping bags made out of old curtain material; cheap-looking beads laid out on a square of dirty black cloth. The proper stallholders had trestle tables with their wares arranged carefully. They nodded respectfully at customers and hovered waiting to assist. Aggie brought along an old deckchair and stood up languorously, holding aside her long skirts and stooping, somehow gracefully, to pick up things from the ground. ‘This is a lovely piece, isn’t it? Sterling silver. The beads are antique too,’ she would say, smiling up at some shy, pointing ten-year-old girl. Her gaze would shift to take in the mothers too, and then her charm almost had them, sometimes it did. The limpid brown eyes, the deceptive air of calm that drew people in, men and women. She was aware of her beauty, smiling her slow smile.
When her mother died, Aggie bought a kiln and a wheel with the inheritance. For a while, Jessie and Ali hung around watching her throw pots in the back shed. As time went on, rain got in, and one day Ali came over and saw the wheel had been left on the grass. Soon bird shit stained the top, and weeds sprouted around it.
‘Come through, darling. There’s nice light in the kitchen at this time of day. I’ll put the kettle on.’
It was bright out there, and Ali liked it better, felt more comfortable. There was a round table with four chairs, and against one wall a cabinet of op-shop plates. In this room she could almost imagine she was in Jessie’s house.
Aggie poured the tea. ‘Matty was the only one who looked the part,’ she was saying. ‘No doubt Erica — that’s his partner, did you meet her? Very pretty girl, quite young — was up ironing his shirt and brushing off that suit at the crack of dawn.’ She smiled as if to say, young women of today, though none of them, even Erica, was young any more. ‘She’s very efficient. Some kind of high-up corporate job, you know.’ She handed Ali a cup and pushed soy milk towards her. ‘Cal looked okay, but his suit was a bit shiny, didn’t you think? And then Eli in that cheap blue shirt. Terrible.’ She smiled, and Ali was sure she knew nothing of what happened with Cal. She thought of Jessie rolling her eyes when she asked once whether Aggie ever had a job. ‘No one home,’ she’d said, knocking a knuckle against her head.
‘Probably picked it up at the op-shop on the way,’ Aggie continued. ‘Stain on the pocket. Did you see? Black pen!’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Ali shook her head, letting the words wash over her. She couldn’t remember Aggie talking this much, talking essentially about nothing, but then Jessie always pulled Ali away from her.
Aggie stood up, opened the dresser drawer and took out tobacco and papers. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ She smiled. ‘I make myself put them away so I smoke less, but it doesn’t really work.’
‘Of course. Go ahead.’
‘Dreadful habit, but it’s my only vice now,’ she said with a wink. Ali watched her long, deft fingers rolling the cigarette and lighting it. She inhaled, sighed, blew smoke in a perfect stream. ‘Jessie filled out with the institutional food, you know. I hated the smell of it. Stale oil, mashed potatoes. Dreadful sauces. It got to me, that food. She hated anything creamy before. No taste for stodge. But that was another thing that changed. She got so she would eat anything, anything at all.’
Ali tried to think of what she wanted to say. She could just sit there and let Aggie talk, but she knew she shouldn’t, that she would regret it.
‘Red hair doesn’t go grey, they say, and it’s true. Hers just faded. That was sad. It would have been easier if there had been no link with how she was before.’
Ali’s eyes filled with tears. She smiled self-mockingly. ‘She never realised what great hair she had.’
Aggie patted her hand and held her gaze. She brought the cigarette to her lips. ‘She was Jerome O’Shaughnessy’s daughter — you know that, don’t you?’
Ali nodded. ‘I knew of the family. A bit.’
He was so inconsequential that she hardly remembered him, and she’d gleaned the information from Diane, not Jessie. A big, rough Catholic family. He must have been younger than Aggie, because there were still siblings of his at high school. After all these years, Ali realised the implications of this — Eli, Cal, Matty had been at the school, and Jessie was meant to go there. The father was a drunk bully, she heard Diane say once. Jerome had moved away. And Jessie never even said his name.
‘What a square he was!’ Aggie laughed. ‘It was a silly, stoned mistake, and then what luck I had. Not sure why I went ahead … I guess I thought I wanted a girl. Not very girly, was she, though?’ She pulled on her cigarette again and grimaced comically, showing a missing molar on one side. ‘And it was only once with Jerome. Anyway, he was the bringer of the red hair. None of it in my family. At first, I wasn’t sure whose it was, but when the red hair appeared, I knew. Though of course Debra’s father is a redhead, so it’s popped up in the grandkids too.’ She sighed. ‘Funny.’
Ali smiled, though she felt sad for Jessie. And she imagined Cal’s fury if he’d heard. Went ahead. ‘A strong gene, red hair.’
‘Yeah.’ Aggie took a last puff of her cigarette and stubbed it out. Just for a second the words stopped, and it was as if they shared the sadness, and then she started again. ‘He always sent a bit of money. Regular as clockwork, but he never came to see her. Shame, really. It might have helped her to have him around.’
She had to speak before Aggie started up again. ‘I still miss her. She was great.’ Stupid. A stupid thing to say.
‘I know you do, darling. I know.’
Ali’s throat constricted, and for a second she thought she would tell her everything. And then Aggie picked up her tobacco and began to roll another cigarette. In the end, before Mumbulla, she wrote gobbledygook. Scraps of songs. Nonsense words over and over. Bored bored bored bored bored bored. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. After they had a fight, she changed her name. She couldn’t call her Jessie, just in case, so she called her JNH, Jessie No Hoper. Or JD, Jessie Dimwit.
She couldn’t tell her. Aggie wouldn’t have the patience to hear about their little quests, their tests. She wouldn’t understand the little threads of spite, the hate that, by being written down, would have seemed to overtake the love.
Aggie patted her wrist. ‘Oh, darling, I know it was hard for you. That night, when that cop — what was his name, Murray someone — took you back there to find her, what a brave thing that was.’
‘What?’ Ali felt her teeth beginning to chatter in her jaw, heard the click of it, her legs beginning to shake. Aggie was looking at her intently. ‘I didn’t go.’
Aggie’s eyes were huge. ‘Yes, you did, darling. You took them to Mumbulla. You showed them where she was. Oh darling, I’m sorry. You’ve forgotten or blocked it out, I suppose. It’s understandable that you have. What a terrible thing for a young girl to have to do.’
Ali wanted to slap her. ‘No, no,’ she said, harshly, loudly, feeling her mouth ugly and spread. ‘I didn’t go back. I’ve never been back. No, you’re wrong. I didn’t go.’
40
It was a long, bumpy road, and Ali threw a mint into her mouth to work against carsickness. Near the turnoff, before the national park began, she passed the last couple of houses before the bush took over. The one where she had gone for help was almost unrecognisable. She slowed and wound down the car window. It was painted federation green, with blue-and-white-striped deckchairs on the verandah, and a cumquat tree in a pot. The one next door was so different as to be almost comic: an abandoned washing machine on the verandah, a rusty car with no tyres perched on the front lawn, a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign.
In the last part, the road was rough and pitted, and she had to concentrate as she drove. This was good. She thought of looking at Jessie’s old house the day before, how transformed it was too: a smooth lawn and a trampoline with a protective net where once Ali had dumped her bike; the rotting verandah where the boys had lounged and smoked joints had been rebuilt and painted a pristine white. Looking at it, she’d had the same sense of confusion as after it happened, lying awake, puzzling. Then the shallow, tantalising dreams when she was sure she had worked it out. Where Jessie had gone.
Ali read the sign, wondering if it had been there all along. Mumbulla Mountain is sacred to the Aboriginal people of the South Coast and Monaro. Mumbulla Falls is one of many places within Biamanga National Park that has great spiritual significance. Pain now but muted, another unwitting transgression, another kind of stupidity. Probably she had ignored the sign along with everyone else, Jessie’s obliviousness being of a different sort. There had been a petition to the federal government in the 1970s about Mumbulla, an attempt to stop the woodchipping, and by 1980 it had worked. But it wasn’t until at least twenty years later that Aboriginal ownership was established. She remembered, in a hazy way, Aggie’s early involvement, and maybe her parents went to a meeting or two. But she and Jessie had had no clue.
