by Lily Malone
He put his finger out, covered her lips, stopped her words.
‘I would marry you in a heartbeat, JT, because I love you. I’ve loved you since we were in school. Even if you didn’t love me—and I don’t know much but I know you do love me—I would marry you if it made you and your mum safe,’ Brix said, standing proud and straight in the carpark of his brother’s pretty café by the pretty little bridge, listening to her big ugly story.
‘Thank you,’ she said formally. ‘I will be a good wife.’
‘JT,’ he frowned again, more lines wrinkling across his brow. ‘I don’t know how to say this, okay, and I’ll probably do it all wrong. I don’t have a psychology degree—we really should talk to Taylor, this is her field—’
She stiffened. ‘No! No one else.’
Her father would find out. He’d hurt them. He’d send Jasmine away.
‘We need help, JT. We need to talk to someone who knows this stuff.’
‘Not yet. I’m not ready yet.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. Please, just trust me. Not yet.’ She had to get home. She had to get back. The urgency pounded in her head like a train on its tracks; clickety clack, have to get back.
‘I don’t understand,’ he grumbled. ‘In this day and age, JT. How does this happen? There are agencies … assistance services. There must be some way to get you help? A hotline?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no way I can risk my dad finding out. If they called in at the house—the authorities—’ she shuddered, thinking, ‘it wouldn’t be good.’
‘That’s what they do. They deal with this all the time. They shouldn’t have to, but they do.’
‘I kept thinking I was close. I’ve been saving some money in another account Dad can’t touch—’
‘Wait. What? He gets your money?’
She nodded; miserable, hurting. ‘Since I started at the club my wage goes into our household account. He controls that account. If I ever kicked up about that, he’d miss paying a power bill and we’d all shower in cold water till I apologised and he’d pay the bill and things would be okay again. When I got my first raise, though, I got the club to put the extra in a new account. I’ve had another raise since.’ She was ashamed to hear her voice waver at this admission, made whisper-quiet, as if the birds flitting near the Chalk Hill Bridge had ears and would tell all.
‘I’ve been trying to get enough money in that account to cover bond and an advance on a place to rent and take my mum with me … but it’s hard, Brix. Mum got married for life. Where my mum comes from, women get married for life. She wanted a Western husband. Her parents dreamed, she dreamed of marrying a rich white man and then my dad walked into that bar. It’s what all girls who grow up in poverty in the Philippines want—a white man who can give them white babies and a better life than the one they’ve been living. She worries she’ll lose face if they break up, and she definitely wouldn’t come with us if we weren’t married. It’s so different to here.’
‘Let me at least talk to the sergeant at Mount Barker police—’
‘What if my dad finds out? He’ll hurt Mum. I don’t know what he might do.’
‘Someone needs to be with us. If we go out there and announce we’re married “oh and by the way, Keith, I’m taking Rosalie with us too” he could get out a gun and shoot us.’
‘He doesn’t have a gun, but he wouldn’t need a gun to kill anyone,’ she muttered.
‘Don’t make him into a hero, JT. He’s a coward. Any bloke who’d hit a woman is gutless. He’s nothing.’
‘You know that and I know that, but we have to be smart about this. I need to find out about restraining orders and what’s involved and I can’t risk him finding out what I’m up to. I need to talk to Mum without freaking her out completely.’
‘You need to get some proof together. You need to take a photo of your back,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to write an affidavit and an application for the court. I don’t think you can get a restraining order without fronting a magistrate, JT.’
‘I’ll look into it. I have the internet at work and I’ll look it all up. I’ll get a photo when I get home.’ She’d get a photo of Jazzy too, while her eye was swollen up.
‘Take it into a mirror so they see your face and your …’ his eyes filled with tenderness, so like Brix, and he swallowed, ‘… your back.’
‘Okay.’
She could pull these things together in the background. She’d be like a duck, webbed feet in the water paddling but on top of the water she’d be calm and serene. Her dad would never know any different.
Gotta get back, clickety clack.
‘How soon can we get married, Brix? Christmas? Christmas Day?’
His hands closed tighter around hers. ‘Christmas is like, two months away.’
‘I don’t need much time. I just need it legal.’
‘There’ll be formalities. We have to find out—’
‘Can you call? Can you speak with a celebrant? Can you find out what we need? I’ll handle the restraining order stuff. I’ll handle my dad but I can’t organise a wedding too.’
‘There’s a lady I know who works as a celebrant. I’ll talk to her tomorrow—’
‘Can you call her today?’
Brix touched her hair, being so careful now not to touch her shoulders or her back. ‘When I get back to the farm, okay?’
For the first time in hours and hours, some of her tension eased. She’d shown Brix her worst, well, almost her worst—she hadn’t told him about Jaz—and he was still here, right in front of her, and he’d help.
‘Okay,’ she said, leaning into him, inhaling comfort from his shirt and his skin. ‘Okay.’
‘Will you be safe if you go back?’
‘If I don’t make him mad, I’ll be fine.’
‘Jesus, JT. Let me get your phone outta my car. I don’t like this. I hate this.’
‘Then help me get out, but we do it my way. Promise me.’
He scrubbed his hand through his hair. ‘I’ll only promise to a point. I won’t come to the farm unless you say so, okay? If you need me, call me. I’ll get help out there, even if I’m back in Margaret River. Abe and Jake would go if I asked them. They’d help you in a heartbeat, no questions asked.’
‘I can help myself, for the most part. Please don’t involve anyone else in my problems.’ It’s not safe.
She let him go then, backing away, being strong. Being the way she always was.
* * *
Jaydah unlocked the interior door into the laundry and stepped into the smell of cat litter and washing powder. Ginger Puss lay stretched along the glass sliding doors that led out to the washing line and verandah, his tail twitching lazily in the crack of sun. Those doors were locked, the curtains pulled closed.
Her father’s bull terrier-cross, Hammer, stirred on the verandah. The dog’s shadow crossed the curtain and his chain scraped.
On top of the washing machine, Jaz’s small CD player spun something by Jimmy Barnes. Jaz loved Jimmy Barnes almost as much as she loved playing Snap.
Jaz’s farm pieces stretched across the grey and white tiles.
Jaz loved playing farm almost as much as she loved Jimmy Barnes and Snap combined. She could create the most intricate connection of yards for the sheep and cows, stables for the horses, paddocks and fences and farmhouses. Green LEGO made grass. Blue LEGO and pieces she’d cut from the lids of ice-cream containers made water troughs or creeks. A bunch of old straw lined the floor of the plastic stables, and leaves and twigs from the garden twined into the fences to make trees.
Sometimes Jaz’s farm montages would cover the six square metres of laundry tiles and Jaz would be at the epicentre of it, taking up the only bare space.
Her sister’s face lit up when she saw Jaydah, and Jaydah smiled, too, until she got another look at the bruise across her twin’s eye.
She dragged her phone out of her carry basket. ‘You look like a panda bear, Jasmine Tully.’
> ‘David Attenborough says panda bears are very rare,’ Jaz said, moving a yellow chicken into a different coop.
‘They are. In fact, they are so rare I need a photo of one. Look at me, panda bear.’
Jaz looked up, and Jaydah clicked.
‘Now I have proof that the very rare panda exists on Jasmine’s farm. You need to make a bamboo stand for the panda. What could be bamboo?’
Jasmine pawed through her many containers of materials and settled on something, lifting it up. ‘This one!’
She held a handful of straw high, before shoving the stalks into a piece of fence so it would stand straight.
‘Pandas are in the wild, not on a farm,’ Jaz said. She started rocking, worrying about the panda and Jaydah didn’t want to see it escalate into something more. It was her silly comment about her twin’s eye that caused the whole panda thing, and all she’d wanted was a photo.
‘Are you hungry? You ready for some lunch, Jazzy?’
‘Can I have two-minute noodles?’
Trust food to be the best distraction. Jaz was always hungry. ‘Okay. But you have to have some vegies in them. Broccoli. Carrots. Peas.’
‘Awww,’ she said, chin jutting grudgingly. ‘If I have to. I want the black packet ones. I like them best.’
‘We’ll see what’s in Mum’s pantry.’
‘It’s Daddy’s pantry. It’s Daddy’s house.’
‘But who does all the cooking?’
Jaz thought about it for a bit and finally acknowledged, ‘Mum does.’
‘Maybe after lunch we’ll go for a drive out to the quarry, okay?’
‘Dad said we have to sort out rocks in Number 4 bay.’
‘We’ll do that too, after we go out to the quarry.’
‘Why do we have to go to the quarry at all?’
‘It’s a nice day, Jaz. We can make some rock men together.’
Immediately Jaz brightened. ‘Okay.’
‘Better pack up your farm then. Into the ice-cream containers. Get them all picked up because we don’t want Dad to tread on a hard piece of it, do we?’
We don’t want to do anything that makes Dad angry.
‘Good night, Harry dog. Good night, chickens.’ Jaz picked up a handful of sheep. ‘Go to bed and do not call out, Lamby. Be a good girl.’
Jaz kissed the horse on its nose. ‘Good night, Tara. Be a good girl. Don’t make me smack you!’
Horses were her favourite of everything. Farm. Snap. Rock men at the quarry. Jimmy Barnes.
Plastic rattled into the containers. Cattle. Pigs. Goats. Stables. Fences. Ping. Ping. Ping. Gates. Water troughs. Leaves. Twigs.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
* * *
Brix had a heap of things to do for Jake, but they all had to wait because the first thing he did when he got home from the café was Google ‘domestic violence’ and, of course, when the search pages came up he started berating himself.
The ‘do’ list read like this:
•Listen
•Let the person cry
•Ask what you can do to help
He supposed he’d managed a few of those, but the ‘don’t’ list was the more worrying:
•Don’t ask ‘why’ questions, they cast blame
•Don’t offer solutions
•Don’t threaten to take action. The person has enough to worry about without worrying about your reaction.
He sighed and beat himself up a bit more. He couldn’t remember the conversation with Jaydah word for word—he’d been too messed up—but he had definitely asked why, and he’d also definitely offered to go punch her father’s lights out, and get a posse together to punch her father’s lights out, and she was telling him he couldn’t do any of that.
It made him feel hopeless.
Useless.
Powerless.
How could all the right things to do (which felt like bloody well doing nothing at all) feel so wrong?
He knew what it cost JT to show him those cuts and admit she needed help. She’d never been good at asking for help and if he blew her trust now, he’d be as bad as her father.
He bookmarked the web page and closed the browser down.
The next thing he did was look up the number for Anita Revel, the marriage celebrant he knew back home.
He had a lot on his mind twenty minutes later as he whistled for Jess, Jake’s farm dog, and fired up the quadbike to head out into the far paddock to shift the sheep.
CHAPTER
5
It always surprised people when they learned the quarry at the Tully farm was at the top of the hill, not the bottom. ‘River rocks’ just came with some expectation of being dug out of a river, Jaydah knew. She’d lost track of the number of times she’d told patrons at the club that the rocks on the Tully farm were formed millions of years ago by a glacier.
That glacier had once covered a large swathe of the scarp to the north of Chalk Hill, although most of the rocks it formed were buried deep underground. Here on their property, a river had cut through the hill, exposing the rocks where they clung to the very southern edge of the scarp.
The quarry was Jaydah’s favourite part of the farm, up here, high on the hill where the wind beat wild wings against the plateau day after day. White dust willy-willies stirred unless they’d had rain to damp the dust down, or if her dad had sent her to switch on the big bore sprinkler because a customer was coming and wanted to see the quarry’s colours glow.
In their early days here, if the kids on the bus had been particularly cruel, she’d sit up in the cab on the mini-excavator and close the door against the buffeting wind and watch the sprinklers as the water wet the rock piles and made the colours shine.
She hadn’t come up here as much once Brix became her friend. She hadn’t needed to pit herself against her loneliness and stare it down so it knew she wasn’t afraid to be by herself against the world.
Brix.
Where would she be without him?
Jaydah heaved a sigh and ran her hand through her hair, catching the black tresses over her shoulder to keep them from whipping across her eyes.
She had to tell Brix about Jaz. She’d already lumped her life and its problems in his hands by asking for his help, and he didn’t know the worst of it.
That’s how bad she was.
‘Jaydah? Jaydah, look!’ Jaz shouted from the thick sprawling base of the pyramid of medium-grade rocks—their best-selling line.
Jaydah held her hand up to shield her eyes from the whitish glare and smiled despite the pain the movement caused across her back.
‘I made a snow rock man!’
‘So you did, Jazzy!’ Jaydah picked a path towards her twin.
‘See?’ Jaz said, wedging a twig into the side of the pile. ‘That’s his arm.’
‘He does look like a snowman. He’s all white for a start,’ Jaydah said. ‘Where’s his other arm?’
‘It falled off.’
‘It fell off.’
Jaz bent to retrieve the twig from the base of her snowman and shove it back into the pile.
‘Does he have a name?’
‘Yes,’ Jaz nodded solemnly. ‘Tara.’
‘I should have guessed,’ Jaydah said, and her smile grew. ‘Shall we scratch Tara’s name here in the sand?’
‘Yes please.’
Jaydah picked up one of the shovels near the base of the pile. ‘You help me spell it out.’
‘T,’ Jaz said slowly. ‘A.’
Jaydah cut the letters into the sand. When the river rocks were dug from the hill they’d come up in excavator scoops of smooth rock, broken pebbles and gravel, all in a fine powder of kaolin clay—the fine whitish material used for making porcelain. It compacted quickly, especially with water, wind, the excavator tracks and their booted feet to pack it down.
‘R,’ Jaz said, rolling her tongue, watching to make sure Jaydah got it right, ‘and another A.’
‘There,’ Jaydah said, stepping back. ‘Tara Snowman.’
‘Tara Snowgirl. Let’s make her a friend.’
‘Okay.’
Jaz started shaping another tall thin pile beside the first, tongue peeking at the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on shaping the bigger rocks at the base.
‘How about I go find some bigger twigs for this one’s arms?’
‘Okay. I want them to have leaves on the end for fingers. Like Tara Snowgirl.’
‘Okay.’
Jaydah crossed the flat rectangle of the quarry, towards the eastern edge where she could still see the crescent shape of the old rubbish tip like a scar among the taller trees. Subsequent years of Chalk Hill Primary School kids had done tree-planting projects to re-vegetate the tip, and those trees were growing higher. The ‘scar’ of the site was fading.
Occasionally, if the wind swirled, the distant whine of a car engine carried from the highway and sometimes the bellow of a bull from Sibly’s farm. Otherwise, the wind was all there was to hear, or feel, or—when the clay swirled—see.
Grey clouds shrouded the Porongurups to the north-east, blown in across the miles as if they hurried to greet her.
She closed her eyes against the wind, leaning forward when it tried to push her back, holding her arms wide even though it made her shoulders sting. The air smelled briny and cold and thrilling—she opened her eyes.
It was all so wild and free.
‘Jaydah!’
She jumped, startled by her sister’s call over the wind. ‘What is it, Jaz?’
‘I’m ready for them. I need the arms!’
‘Coming!’ she shouted.
She picked up a handful of scrubby twigs from underneath a bush that clung to the hill and turned back up the track.
‘What are we calling this one, Jaz?’ Jaydah asked her sister as Jaz wedged the new sticks into her pile.
‘Frosty,’ Jaz said, ‘for the song Mum sings at Christmas.’
‘Frosty the Snowman?’
‘That one.’ Jaz stared at her pile of snow-coloured rocks, hand on hips and declared again: ‘Frosty.’
* * *
Except for the only cut that had bled—the one high on her shoulder blades that itched as it scabbed and healed—Jaydah’s movements were back to their fluid ‘normal’ by the end of the week.
