We were quiet then. Everything inside that church looked out of place because everything was a slightly different colour from what it was meant to be in this light. Greens turned to oranges and browns looked like they were burning. All that silence and beauty, and suddenly Asheeka let out a scream.
I didn’t know where to look at first. ‘What?’ I said to her. She was standing in the middle of the aisle looking out through the opened church doors to the world beyond.
‘Did you see that?’ She stood still, staring out those doors like she was looking for an omen or something. ‘I just – the doors just opened, just like that, on their own. I thought . . . I thought it might be God or something.’
But it wasn’t God. It was a wombat. It came in and waddled towards us and we both ran towards the back of the church to get away from it.
‘Don’t they bite?’ Asheeka whispered to me as though any loud noise might turn it into a vicious creature.
‘I don’t know . . . I think they’re like koalas? You know, they look all cute and all but have claws like razor blades.’
Behind the wombat, red moonlight and smoke gushed in through the doors as though we were entering heaven or something. The wombat laid down, curled itself into a ball and made a creepy sound like a small child crying. We walked towards it. The paw sticking out from underneath its body looking singed. Asheeka held up a hand above it and slowly, carefully, brought two fingers down and touched its back gently.
I’ll fast forward here because no reader wants to see that scene up close, not really, anyway. That summer, everyone (except maybe Asheeka and me) was stuck to the TV and the phone or they were in it and they saw those images of the fires. Everyone knows what happens in scenes like this and it isn’t pretty. We didn’t know what to do to ease its pain. And no, we didn’t have any water we could give it or anything. We didn’t even know what a wombat ate.
*
We didn’t sleep that night. We lay down on pews next to one another and the wind came in through the windows and doors and leaves and ash and odd pieces of paper and bits of stained glass on the floor turned themselves into small tornadoes.
I held my hand up in front of my face and the light from the moon coming down through the ceiling made it look red. Asheeka turned over on the pew next to me and I could see the whites of her eyes looking out for me in the dark.
I wondered if I’d missed something. If we’d already driven into a fire somewhere back there and now we were ghosts. A small beam fell down from the ceiling on the other side of the church and landed like a slap on the ground. We were in purgatory and no God was going to allow me anywhere else to go: not with what I’d done.
‘I did it.’ As soon as the words came out of me, I felt a kind of relief, as though I’d dislodged some sort of ball that had been stuck in my throat.
‘Did what?’
‘You fell asleep in the hotel in Canberra after we plugged in our phones. We’d ordered all that room service and we were hanging out in our new gear and everything felt light and electric for a while and I wanted to keep it going, wanted to keep making things happen with you, and then you were talking about going home and how Arnold wasn’t so bad and all. I was sitting outside on the balcony and looking at all those stars and I had your phone. I was looking for that selfie you took of us inside the play equipment at McDonald’s but I found all those pictures of you instead.’
That was when she started to sit up.
‘I’m sorry. I just opened up your Insta and uploaded them. I think they got shared so many times all over the place that it’s hard to know where they came from first. I can’t explain exactly why I did it. I know it was wrong and I’m sorry.’
By this point she was crouching down in front of me, like right in front of my face.
‘I still think that you looked really beautiful.’
The wind picked up and blew something behind her sharply across the room. My world was going to end at any minute. Asheeka’s face was glowing red. She looked like one of those cherub kids in a horror film who you suddenly realise is possessed. I was waiting for her to make what was left of the ceiling beams crash down on my head, her rage willing them to move. At that moment I wished she would. I knew I deserved a sharp and burning pain and I wanted her to give it to me and then for us to move on.
‘Look. At. You.’ She said it carefully. Measured. I was aware of the ground underneath us, dusty and red-grey, filled with spirals of ash moving. I was aware of myself lying there in my filthy clothes, my knotted hair, my thighs poking over the pew that was unable to contain them. Her face took up all my vision. I was thinking about the way she made me want to be not necessarily a better person but larger, someone who takes up more space, is seen.
‘I never meant to hurt you,’ I said.
‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?’ She looked at me and I saw her as if for the first time. Her disappointment, her rage, her hunger for things she knew she’d probably never get. I felt frightened for her and for me. ‘After everything I’ve done for you!’
‘Done what? What have you done for me?’
‘Everything!’
‘What, helped me tint my eyelashes? Helped me get with Jake?’
‘You liked him. You said you liked him.’
‘He stopped talking to me after we’d had sex a few times and then told everyone I was a slut and now, now everyone’s looking at me . . . the boys, the way they look at me . . .’
‘You wanted to be looked at!’
If we spoke anymore we both knew we would howl and shriek and tear each other apart. Both of us had too much shame, I think, for any ordinary kind of anger.
She got up slowly, walked towards the doors of that church and then out through them, and I lay there, watching her body disappear into the darkness.
IN RETROSPECT
Here I am in my cell putting words in order, sentence after sentence, and all I can think really is that it’s kind of ridiculous turning people’s lives into story, trying to put the events in order so that you have one of those lopsided plot pyramids every teacher you’ve ever had drew on the whiteboard since primary school – orientation, complication, climax, resolution. And what kind of a real-life plot ever truly gets resolved? As if people’s lives don’t keep rolling on when the page is finished.
At the sentencing hearing they turned me and Asheeka into characters, both of us being painted as the forces of Good and Evil battling it out in some Greek myth. But they had no idea. The barrister kept asking if I knew that Asheeka had a ‘reputation’. Actually, just to clarify, it was my defence, not the prosecution who kept asking me that question on the stand. I got what they were trying to imply. I’m not stupid, you know.
One day I remember, court went something like this:
The judge reminded me in this soft teachery voice that I needed to answer the questions truthfully and if I was confused at any point we could stop and ask for the question to be clarified and all that. That’s how it was through the whole thing, everyone always asking if I was confused or needed something clarified, as if I had no ability to understand what I had done or what the implications were.
David, the defence guy the court had given me, started to paint me as this girl who could do no wrong, which he reinforced throughout the hearing, any chance he could. He literally started reading out all my report cards from primary school, building up an image of me as someone who was a ‘conscientious, well-behaved student’, who never took her head out of a book to look at the world around her. He didn’t read any of the ones from the last year or so of high school, when I’d started to slip up.
(And I did pull my head out of a book. I saw lots of things in the world around me in those final days, I saw the soles of my shoes melt off and I washed my hair in the ocean and I saw my face reflected in the windscreen of a car I’d stolen and I learned to walk in my own body.)
David would get up all close to my face as though he had to be so gentle in asking his questi
ons or I’d fall apart. ‘Can you confirm that this is indeed your report card, that you did in fact receive a 94 as your mark for English at the start of year seven?’ and I’d have to say, ‘Yes’ because what else was I supposed to say? He had a squished-up face like he’d run straight into a wall and his nose had never popped back out again.
After he’d asked his question he’d spin around dramatically so that his barrister’s robes would fall off his shoulders and he’d hold that old report card up in front of the sentencing judge, and I’d look out towards where my mum and dad were sitting on opposite sides of the courtroom and my mum would be staring out off into space and Dad would look exceptionally proud despite the situation we’d all found ourselves in now.
Then David would do this comparison thing where they’d pull out Asheeka’s report cards and they’d ask me to read out the comments on hers. He’d point to lines like, Shows no interest in school, fails to do her homework, and I’d have to read them out loud. Then he’d say something like, ‘Asheeka was pretty different from you, wasn’t she?’ He’d say it with a half-smile, as though we were both in on some joke together, and I’d try to look at his barrister’s wig and concentrate on how the bits of his own hair that stuck out from underneath were the same kind of yellowy off-white as the synthetic hair on the wig so it was kind of an interesting mental exercise to tell them apart.
I’d take a deep breath and try not to make eye contact. ‘No,’ I’d say, and he’d brush over the fact that I’d given him the wrong answer again by saying something like, ‘I understand. This is all very difficult for you. Very traumatic. Do we need to take a break?’
And I’d give him this look like I was about to kill him and he’d look at the judge and say, ‘Your Honour. It’s clear my client is under a lot of stress at the moment, and given that she is a minor who has recently experienced some greatly traumatic circumstances, could we call for a quick break?’
And the judge would always say yes because no one wants to look like an arsehole in public, and then David would shuffle me off to that little room at the side of the court and all of a sudden his voice would sound a whole lot less sympathetic than it had when we were in front of the jurors, and before he could start getting angry at me I’d say, ‘I don’t like it when you do that.’
And he would sit down in front of me and fold his arms across his chest and stare at me with those old-man tired eyes and he’d begin to explain the case strategy again as he saw it. ‘Asheeka is not here,’ he’d keep telling me. ‘You’re the only one here. You’re the only one here to take the fall. All we have to do is share the blame with her in her absence. Show how she manipulated you. That’ll help you get a lighter sentence.’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s not what I want to do.’
‘What do you want to do then?’
‘I want you to stop trying to tell her story.’
‘Okay. Why don’t you tell it?’
‘I can’t. I don’t know it. Not all of it anyway.’
‘You don’t understand the law.’
‘I don’t care.’ What I wanted to explain to him was that it wasn’t really that I didn’t care, but that being out there on the road made me realise that people are always playing with your story, inventing you, changing who you are to suit them. I didn’t want anyone to tell her story. I owed her that at least.
‘I think you will care. I definitely think you will care, particularly if you end up in an adult jail. You have no idea what it’s like in those places. They’re full of people who are so smacked out on drugs they think they’re Jesus Christ, and you’ll be in a cell with them. Them and all the cockroaches and the darkness. You’re only allowed outside for an hour or so a day.’
That’s when I started to cry. David leaned forward and took my hand and said, ‘Look, really, no one’s innocent in all this. Both of you should’ve known better, but you’ve got to fight with me now. There’s no sense in ruining your future. If you play your cards right, you’ll probably only get six months or so. Good kid like you, no history of misdemeanours, you can start again. It’ll be like none of this ever happened.’
‘But it did happen,’ I said.
‘I know. But there’s a difference between what happened according to the law and what happened according to the stories we tell ourselves.’
‘It did happen.’ I wanted to get back into that court again and say, This all happened. This is all part of my story. I was alive out there for a while in the real world and it was like a series of earthquakes everywhere and I know I don’t fit right altogether, as a character inside other people’s heads or whatever, but I’m still trying to work it all out.
So I sit here some more, writing it out, trying to find that bit that takes us from the climax and slides us down the other side of the narrative pyramid towards an impossible resolution.
WALKING
So that’s what happened the second time Asheeka went missing. I was such a selfish arsehole. I know that. All right? Believe me, I think about what I did all the time. Sometimes it’s hard to work yourself out and think about other people at the same time.
When Asheeka left the church I just kept on lying there until I was so tired I fell asleep, for an hour or so, maybe more. I woke up inside that church with a small rock pressing into my cheek. The day felt like it was on fire and when I walked outside the church to look at the car one of its tyres was missing.
I walked a little further up the road past the church. When I looked to my left, the highway and beyond was a vast stretch of nothing and blackened grass. On my right were the scribbly gums, and the promise of more flames making their way down from the mountain.
I pictured Asheeka running through fire: I tried to block the image out. What could I do? I walked. I didn’t know what direction I was heading in. I needed to find someone who had a phone. I needed to find someone who could help her. The road went on and on in either direction, disappearing into the smoky skyline. I thought about this book I read once called The Road. It’s a very gloomy book. It goes like this: all the resources in the world have been used up and people are eating each other, and a boy and his father walk down this endless road looking for something better. There is grey light, endless grey light, and everything is devastating and there are all these small moments when the main characters stop moving for a second or an hour or even a day and they’re, like, BAM, I can see the absolute truth of the world.
I walked down the side of the road and waited for the truth of the world to hit me in the face and it did, it really did, for the first time. It sounds strange but it was an abandoned shopping trolley that did it. It was standing there by the side of the road, just like they stood on every street corner back home, but this one was mostly ashy black and the plastic handlebar had melted off and dripped over its wheels like neon-orange ice-cream. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. I kept walking and walking and licking my cracked lips and fantasising about water the way I used to fantasise about a can of Fanta. And then, after a while, a house – an old fibro house with a Hills hoist out the back and a wraparound veranda with a kid’s tricycle, just sitting there. It was like the part in The Road where the boy and his dad find an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere that hasn’t been looted and they get to pig out on things like pineapple rings and toothpaste. The thought of that was the only thing that kept me walking another 300 metres, because at that point the sun was so high and hot in the sky and the smoke so acid in the wind that I wondered if I was burning on the inside every time I breathed. All of it was painful. Breathing. Walking. I tried to remember what kind of shoes Asheeka had left in.
I knocked at the front door a few times before walking around to the back and peering through a window. I put my fingers gently under the window frame and pulled it up until the gap was wide enough to climb through.
Inside the house it was just as hot but the air stood still and it felt like breathing through plastic. There was a police notice on the dining table explaini
ng fire evacuation procedures. A drawer in the living room bureau had been left open, bits and pieces of linen falling over its edges. Some people were even more quick to run than we were.
I pulled a small glass figurine out of the drawer and held it in my hand for a moment before putting it in my pocket. In the kitchen I pulled a Thomas the Tank Engine cup from the cupboard and refilled it over and over again at the sink. Drinking. Drinking. I pulled a half-finished carton of orange juice out of the fridge and drank until the sticky bits of stray juice ran down my cheeks and my neck and pooled in a wet soppy mess at the collar of my dress.
Then I walked through every room looking for a phone. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I had imagined that in a house like this, there’d be some old rotary phone sitting on top of a doily on a side table somewhere because it went with the décor and that’s what you find in old country houses in movies, but of course there wasn’t a phone because who actually has a landline these days?
In the bathroom there was a bathtub full of water and I took off all my clothes and climbed into it. On the edge of the tub there was some kind of kid’s strawberry soap and I rubbed it over every part of my body and laid there watching my knees sticking out from the top of the water. I let myself sink down, pulled my head up again. Breathed in strawberry fields. Reminded myself that I was here.
In another room I found some clothes, a slightly too large bra and underwear and cotton pants that seemed to fit, drawers full of tops and one in particular – an old t-shirt that said Elvis on the front in faded letters – which I put on even though it was too big, kind of like an ode to Asheeka and her family in their absence. I thought about the things that Asheeka might have chosen, the red lipstick on top of the bureau, the glittery sandals. Maybe she wouldn’t choose those things now.
Girls in Boys' Cars Page 13
