Last Bridge Before Home

by Lily Malone

  The rain crafted his hair into spikes. A raindrop teetered at the tip of one, about to launch off his forehead.

  ‘It’s not gonna start, JT. Someone stole your battery. Hop in and I’ll take you home.’

  ‘I don’t need you to take me home.’ She could make it if she ran. Her dad would want her to run. He’d have set his timer, see how fast she could do it.

  It was a test.

  From the Bowling Club to the Tully farm driveway was about six kilometres by road but much quicker as the crow flew. If she could fly she’d be there in ten minutes. If she ran, she could be there in twenty. She had a head torch in the back of her car with her training gear. She’d swap these shoes for her joggers. Take the firebreak behind Lilac Hill Loop to get down to the Muirs Highway. If she crossed the highway and ran through the Sibly’s farm she’d be on Jarradene Road and from there …

  All this flashed through her brain in the time it took three fat raindrops to dive down Brix’s temple.

  He shook water from his eyes. ‘Jaydah, it’s not a flat battery, okay? The battery’s gone. Those young dudes that gave you grief earlier probably took it just to muck you around. I’ve got a set of leads in my car but there’s nothing I can jump start for you. Let me take you home.’

  ‘I’ll run. I’ll be fine. I’ve got my running shoes in the back.’

  Nobody stole her battery. Her dad took it out. A test. She needed her joggers. She pressed the button for the boot release.

  Brix’s head jerked at the sound. ‘Jesus, JT, you are not damn well running home. Okay? So get your butt into my car and I’ll take you.’

  It would be quicker in Brix’s car. She’d only have to run two kilometres up the driveway then. They were wasting time talking. They’d already wasted time talking.

  Jaydah poured out of the driver’s seat, leaving Brix to slam the door against the rain. She was around the back of the Subaru in seconds—lifting the hatch, getting her training bag, closing the hatch—and Brix still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, taking hold of the passenger door handle on Brix’s Toyota, leaping in.

  This time he didn’t say a word. He just climbed in the driver’s side and started the car.

  Jaydah toed off her comfy work shoes and started pulling on her joggers, lacing them up.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what in holy hell you’re doing?’ Brix asked, navigating the white car out of the club, picking up speed on the bitumen. Street lights turned the rain to glinting mist. All the house curtains were shuttered and drawn. Clouds smothered the sky.

  Jaydah had her shoes laced by the time Brix reached the highway. He turned right and they flashed past the 100km speed sign, past Quarry Road where he’d usually turn in the direction of the Honeychurch farm, and after another minute he indicated left at Jarradene Road. They had two hundred metres of bitumen, then he hit gravel gone slick with rain and he slowed. Jaydah almost howled her frustration at how much attention he paid to the road conditions, but that was Brix. He’d always been about doing the right thing.

  His spotlights spread across the road and widened to the ditches each side of it, showing a border of white-trunked gum trees like skeletal fingers.

  Then the white 3627 rural property marker for her father’s farm shone in Brix’s headlights, and beyond it, Jarradene Road kept winding to nowhere. It used to be the road to the old rubbish tip, till the council relocated the tip. Now, no one had any reason to come here unless they were a Tully, driving into the Tully farm, or a customer coming to pick up a trailer-load of river rocks. No one else ever came to the Tully farm, except the local coordinators who came to see Jaz. Not that they came much.

  Brix stepped on the brake. The Toyota slowed as he shifted down through the gears and prepared to turn.

  Jaydah put her hand on the door handle. ‘This is great, thanks. Here will do.’

  ‘I’ll take you up to the house. Hold on.’

  ‘Brix, this is fine.’ Her dad would want her to run. If he hadn’t already flipped out completely, he would if he saw her get out of Brix’s car. Could he see the headlights from the house? Would he know she hadn’t run all the way?

  ‘Running in the rain is crazy, JT. This is nuts.’

  She took her headtorch from her bag and adjusted it, smoothing the band over her hair. ‘I know it’s raining. I see the rain, okay? I’m happy to run from here. How many times have I said to you that you can’t come up to my house? You can’t come to my house. That doesn’t change because it’s raining. It doesn’t change because someone stole my car battery. It doesn’t change, Brix, now stop the car. Stop the car.’

  It came out all stopthecar, mashed into one desperate word and she put her hand on the door handle, ready to yank.

  The Toyota jerked to a stop. Light flooded the interior as she opened her door.

  ‘What are you going to do in the morning about your car? Did you bring your phone?’ Brix said.

  She kicked her work shoes after the training bag into the foot space. ‘My phone’s back at the club in my car. I’ll grab my bag off you tomorrow if that’s okay. I don’t want to carry anything. Thank you so much for the lift.’

  ‘Do you want—’

  She was done talking.

  Jaydah slammed the door. She blew Brix a kiss on her fingers and sprinted into the night. His headlights lit the way for the first thirty metres and she flicked the on-switch on her headtorch as she ran so by the time she reached the limit of his spotlights, her torch took over.

  She lifted her hand in a wave. One that she hoped conveyed I got this and don’t follow me, because if he followed her he’d only make things worse.

  Then she couldn’t think about Brix anymore and it was all she could do to lean into the run and concentrate on where she put her feet, and be fast. She had to be fast.

  * * *

  What the actual heck?

  Brix sat back against the driver’s seat and watched the woman he loved disappear into the night. She was a silhouette, then she was a shadow, and he stared into the rain until all he could see was the bob and bounce of her torchlight. Then she gave him a single wave without looking back, dashed around a bend in the Tully driveway and was gone.

  He sat with the engine idling and the spotlights turning the wet road ahead bright white, watching the rain because there was nothing else to see.

  Jaydah did things on a scale of ‘puzzle him’ to ‘confound him’ to ‘completely piss him off’ and she did those things regularly—had done since she’d first climbed up the steps of the Mount Barker school bus with her head down and a curtain of black hair hiding her face. He’d had his fourteenth birthday in those January school holidays. She wasn’t fourteen yet.

  It took six months before she’d let him sit beside her on the bus, although she’d never exactly stopped him earlier than that, but she’d always sat with headphones on and her knees all drawn up on the seat with a textbook forever open on her thighs. She never spoke. He’d never seen her put her hand up in class and they shared a few. Geography. Maths. Biology. English.

  She was smarter than him. Their maths teacher sat the kids in order of where they’d finished in the last exam. Dumbest kid sat nearest the door. Smart kids sat at the back. Jaydah was always in the back row, but sometimes he studied hard enough to ace a test and his reward was he’d get to sit beside her. One whole term he got to sit at the desk in front of her and when Mr Bradford wasn’t looking he could half-turn, lean back, maybe slip her a mint or a lolly. Sometimes she’d smile.

  She spent recess and lunch in the library on wet days, and when the sun came out she’d sit on the school oval with her textbooks out and her hat pulled low.

  She never ordered canteen. Most days she ate lunch from a wrapped soft-top bowl. Sometimes she’d finish leftover what-ever-it-was on the bus and Nino Scarponi would pinch his nose and say it stank little Jap skank, and then Lila Marsh would yell at him for being racist.

  Only Jaydah wasn’t Japanese. Brix ask
ed his mum and his mum said she was pretty sure Mrs Tully was from the Philippines but don’t quote her because she hadn’t actually ever met the woman, she was just telling him what other people said.

  The day he did sit near Jaydah, he hadn’t meant to, not really. They had a different bus driver. Brix was last on the bus with Jake and Jake shoved him over an argument about the result of the football derby at the weekend—Eagles beat Dockers. He liked Eagles, Jake liked Dockers. At the same time Jake shoved, the new lady driver hit the accelerator harder than old Mr Tanner ever did. Brix fell across the nearest seat, knocked Jaydah’s book flying, and got stuck because for the first time ever she pulled her headphones off, swung them on the cord and whacked him across the chin before he could blink.

  ‘Hey. I’m sorry okay? I didn’t mean to. He pushed me.’ Man, that stung. He put his fingers to his chin, expecting them to come back red with blood.

  ‘Well why don’t you push off? Go sit somewhere else,’ she’d said.

  Actual words. The first he’d ever heard fall from her lips. The sound stunned him more than the whack across the chin. Second thing to stun him were her eyes. All rich brown earth and old as a river, above a soft swell of cheekbone that made him think of holding the curve of the moon.

  ‘I know I look funny so you don’t need to stare at me okay? I know I don’t look the same as all of you.’ She jutted her chin towards the kids in the seats behind them. ‘Okay?’

  About that time he’d noticed she was rolling something in her hands, a magazine? Rolling, rolling it into a tight stick.

  He brought his hands in front of his face because he could see murder in her eyes long before his brain worked out that a rolled magazine could ever actually be used as a weapon.

  He peered closer at the colourful cartoons shaping round and round as she rolled, except she’d stopped rolling. She was stuffing the rolled magazine in her school bag like he or Jake might if they thought their mum was about to bust them looking at a stick mag. Not that they were ever allowed to buy stick mags, but the shearers left them in the shed sometimes.

  ‘That’s a comic,’ Brix said. ‘I thought you were studying but you weren’t studying at all. You’re reading a comic.’

  ‘So? Who cares what I’m reading?’

  ‘I thought you were studying. Everyone on the bus thinks you study all the time and that’s why you’re so smart.’

  ‘I don’t care about anything on this bus.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘You have a brother on the bus.’

  ‘He’s a dick.’

  Her eyes got wide. ‘He’s your brother.’

  ‘I know. He’s still a dick. You saw him push me. We always fight. I bet you fight with your brothers …’ Her face was blank. ‘Okay, sisters then …’

  ‘I don’t have anyone.’ Every bit as swift as she’d just rolled and packed that magazine, Jaydah untangled the twisted headphones from the cord and stuck them in her ears. Then she turned to stare out the window and said nothing for the rest of the bus ride.

  So she didn’t have brothers or sisters. She was on her own. A farm wasn’t the best place if you were on your own. Imagine his place with just him and his mum and dad and no Jake or Abe. That’d suck.

  Brix sat beside Jaydah again on the way home to see what she’d do. What she did was nothing. The headphones stayed on and she read her comic, laying it carefully inside the open lab assignment workbook in her lap.

  For every bus trip to and from Chalk Hill for the rest of their time at Mount Barker Senior High School he sat beside Jaydah on the bus and somewhere towards the end of the second year, she finally let him hold her hand.

  Brix rubbed his jaw. The memory of being whacked with her headphones was old but there were times he could still feel that sting. JT could always sting him.

  There was a flat-sounding squeak as the windscreen wiper grated on drying glass. The rain had stopped.

  He’d only ever been up the Tully driveway once. Years and years ago when he first got his driver’s licence and Dad said he could borrow the old ute and the only person Brix wanted to take for a drive was JT.

  That was the day they had their first fight. Well, second if you count the headphones on the bus. Jaydah hadn’t spoken to him for weeks after her dad sent him belting so fast out of the Tully farm he almost skidded the old ute and got bogged in the roadside ditch. No way would he have ever been able to go back up to the house and ask Jaydah’s dad to tow him out.

  There’d been many fights since and they were always the same. Whenever he asked about coming to Jaydah’s place—any suggestion that he pick her up, or drop her off, or drop in to say hello—she’d look at him with eyes that were always old and deep and sad but never cried, and she’d say nothing.

  With a mumbled curse, Brix shoved the Toyota in reverse and executed a swift three-point turn, gunning for the bitumen road as he headed back the way he’d come, to an empty house and a cold bed.

  * * *

  The rain had slowed.

  Jaydah’s heart thrummed in her chest but her stride stayed long and smooth and her breath didn’t labour. Her wet hair slapped at her temple and she shook it out of her eye as she leapt the old cattle grid where the driveway met the wire fence—not that they kept cattle since her dad discovered the quarry and the river rocks on the property—glancing up, searching for the house lights.

  Two weak yellow orbs lit the timber verandah either side of the front door. The right-hand side curtain was drawn.

  She studied the house as she ran, slowing her pace, and for a beautiful single second, she thought everything was okay. It looked peaceful in the rain. Night hid the window with cardboard taped across it because of the cracked glass.

  Her dad wouldn’t let her arrange to get the glass fixed. He said it was a good reminder for Jaz not to throw things in the house.

  Then the front door opened, her father’s wiry figure outlined clearly against the glow of a light from inside. Slowly and methodically he tucked his shirt into his pants, pushing each section of loose tail down beneath his denim jeans. His head was up—she knew—she saw the orange flare of the cigarette in his mouth and as he watched her approach at a run the cigarette curled into his smile so that he reminded her of a rattlesnake tasting the night with its tongue.

  ‘You’re getting old, girl. Slowin’ down. Or dontcha care anymore about being home at a decent hour? You call this a decent hour?’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ She stopped six feet from him, trying not to breathe so she could listen for sounds from inside.

  From the back of the house, Hammer barked.

  ‘Shud-up, Hamma, ya mongrel bloody thing,’ her dad yelled.

  Hammer stopped barking.

  ‘I hear that Honeychurch boy is back sniffing around. Saw his brother at the club. Bastards, the lot of ’em, like their old man.’

  ‘Braxton isn’t staying. He’s going home tomorrow.’ She knew better than to call him Brix in front of the monster.

  The cigarette twitched on an indrawn breath. ‘Back to making his fine wines.’ He drew it out, made it sound like fiii-ne wiii-nes.

  Was that a sob from inside? She stepped closer. The smell of bourbon hit her nostrils. Maybe the sob she heard was her own because the night was silent, bar the hum of rain on the roof, the drip in the gutters and the trickle in the downpipes.

  ‘I been waitin’ a while now.’ He unhitched his belt, slowly pulling it through the loops of his jeans. His hands didn’t shake. He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk.

  The ice of his words hit her, melted around her as if she were a tree and those words were the glacier that ran through this property eons ago; slow, inexorable, deadly. There was no getting out of the way of that glacier, not for a tree like her: a tree with roots right here. A tree that couldn’t move.

  Yet.

  She had to say that to keep herself sane. One day she’d make her move, but not yet. She wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t have the money and
her mum wouldn’t leave.

  Jaydah put her foot on the single step up to the verandah. Her dad moved aside to let her pass and followed her into the house, a black energy at her back.

  Quickly now, she trawled through the small square entry of the place with its rack on the right for coats and a boot-brush for dirty boots, and then she jagged immediately right into the kitchen. The dishes were in the drainer. The table was spotless. So was the cooktop, the oven and the floor. She could smell salt and white rice. She could always smell salt and white rice but the scent was strongest in the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Mum and Jazzy?’

  When she turned to ask the question, her dad swapped the belt to his left hand. He shrugged and didn’t answer.

  A low-pitched, keening wail rent the air, and was silenced almost before it began. Jaydah ran from the kitchen back into the corridor, making for the lounge.

  A fire danced behind the glass door of a squat wooden fireplace. Usually there’d be a cat stretched out before it but tonight there was no Ginger Puss. He was too smart for that.

  Her gaze swept the room and found the two figures in the corner. She crossed to her sister and her mum, huddled on the floor behind bent heads and black curtains of hair just like her own. Jasmine rocked rapidly back and forth from the waist while their mother had her arm around Jaz’s head and her hand across Jaz’s mouth, trying to muffle the sounds.

  Jaydah was on her knees and sliding by the time she reached them.

  When she lifted Jazzy’s chin, her sister’s lip was cut and bleeding, her left eye puffing closed. She checked her mother. Rosalie’s face was untouched.

  Jaydah turned to the man in the room and snarled. ‘You knew I would be here. You knew I would take her place.’

  His lip curled and his eyes spat. ‘I told you, you was late.’

  Fury split Jaydah’s brain and she erupted to her feet in one single smooth wave. Her eyes flicked to the rattan sticks mounted in brackets on the ugly orange brick wall of their lounge room, eight feet away.

  She itched for them. Her hands ached for them.

  Her father stood between her and the sticks, balanced evenly, left foot forward, knees relaxed, right shoulder slightly opened out to the brick wall. When she met his gaze, he swapped the belt slowly from his left hand to his right.