Jo didn’t have any jewellery to keep safe, and Mandy had inherited the pearl necklace but was happy for it to sit on her dresser with the rest of her jewellery — a few dress rings, the odd strings of beads picked up at the local op shop. When Ash arrived one day with all her journals, a boxful, furious because she’d caught Jane reading one of them, Jo offered her the safe. When Ash filled a notebook, she slipped it into the safe. Until the red Moleskine, Jo had never once violated Ash’s trust.
What was she supposed to do with the journals? It was obvious Rae would want them, not a bulging make-up bag or an old pair of pants. She was sure it was the journals that had propelled Rae to their front door.
She dropped the notebook, switched on the lamp, and opened the safe. The code was Ash’s birth date, 100891. Jo pulled the journals out one at a time and threw them on the bed. A large diary with a reproduction of the birth of Venus on the cover, the yellow edges battered. A small square notebook with Homer and Marge on a motorbike. A purple velvet journal. Emily the Strange and her cats. A New York skyline, with the Empire State Building in the foreground. The first ever journal, a ballerina on the cover, sealed with a gold lock. Soon her bed was covered with Ash’s journals, scattered and random, forming a crazy quilt. Laura’s grandmother had made Laura a crazy quilt, the pieces of fabric cut from Laura’s baby clothes and cotton blankets, creating haphazard shapes. Laura hung it on the wall. Each piece of fabric came with memories and stories that Laura said made it impossible to sleep under.
‘Fuck, Ash. What am I supposed to do with these?’ Jo said.
So many secrets shared. So many asides and sniggers about other girls, about teachers, about their mothers.
I’m dead. I’m dead. And it’s all your fault.
Jo turned full circle twice. Of course there was no one else in the room; she’d know that voice anywhere. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’
We were both there.
Jo backed away from the bed and the journals and slipped back down to the floor. Sitting up, hugging her knees to her chest, she said, ‘I thought we’d be friends forever. I thought we’d always be friends. Because of you, I didn’t make other friends. Because of you, Ash. I avoided getting closer to other people. I had my best friend. You can have only one best friend.’
Who else would put up with you?
‘I love you. You’re my friend.’
Was. I was your friend. You still suck at tenses.
‘We were friends for so long.’
It’s not enough. Ash’s voice was sharp and shrill. Ash was dancing around the room, mocking her. A shared history isn’t enough. I was over you. I wanted to move on. I was just being nice. Pretending. Kevin said, Don’t be mean. My mother said, Don’t be awful. My father said, You’ve been friends forever. Good friends are hard to come by. I bet they fucking regret that now.
‘Stop, please stop.’ Jo cupped her ears.
I’m not here. I’m dead.
On top of the pile was the Bonnie and Clyde notebook, the one she bought Ash for her seventeenth birthday. On the cover, a photograph of Faye Dunaway wearing a beret and a yellow jacket over a pencil skirt, and Warren Beatty in his 1930s chalk-striped suit. Faye had a gun in her hand. She and Ash dubbed each other Bonnie and Clyde after stealing a pair of earrings from a shop in the city. The shop assistant, a middle-aged woman in a long, flowing dress, had taken several pairs out of the cabinet for Jo. Jo was the decoy. She tried on a pair of short silver and black earrings, then a pair of long dangling earrings in red and pink and orange, admiring herself in the mirror on the counter. She asked the woman’s advice while Ash slipped the first pair of earrings off the counter and into her pocket. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Jo. See you at the café,’ Ash said and left the shop. Jo continued looking at earrings until there were pairs spread over the whole counter. She told the shop assistant that she needed to have a coffee and think about it. When Jo walked into the café, they burst out laughing. ‘We are totally Bonnie and Clyde. From that old movie your mother likes to watch,’ Ash said, wrapping her arm around Jo. ‘We ain’t good. We are the best. BFFs.’
They might not have stayed best friends forever; they might’ve gone their separate ways. But now Ash was dead and Jo couldn’t tell her to fuck off. She couldn’t be the one to stop returning calls.
As if.
She’d never know if Ash was going to drop her, if their friendship was a lie. When had the lying started? If she read all the journals from beginning to end, would she discover the truth?
Crazy Jo, the answer’s not in my journals. You can’t be trusted with anything, with anyone.
She could not read the journals. She gathered them up, shoved them back into the safe, and shut the door. She would never have another best friend.
Chapter 16
By the time Sarah returned to the office, it was after six. She parked the car next to the rest of the office fleet, locked it, returned the key to the drawer behind reception, and left without talking to anyone. She caught the 6.40 to Flinders Street. There were less than a dozen passengers: a couple of groups of male workers with bright orange and green safety jackets; an elderly couple, both reading novels; a gaggle of teenage girls in school sports uniform, carrying hockey sticks and still analysing the game: why they lost and whose fault it was, coming to the conclusion that if they had a better coach they might have won. One of the workmen elbowed his mate and nodded in the girls’ direction. The other guy grinned. ‘That would be cradle snatching.’ Sarah was tempted to tell the men to stop ogling the girls, all under age, but the girls seemed oblivious, the men too old to be on their radar, and she didn’t want to spoil their afternoon.
The accumulated litter of the day’s commuters was scattered around them: abandoned newspapers, soft drink cans, and paper cups carelessly dropped, staining the floor with their sticky dregs; half-eaten food abandoned in scrunched-up paper bags and plastic takeaway containers. The carriage smelt of fried food and sweat. Sarah thought about Ashleigh’s father, standing at the window unable to move, about Ashleigh’s mother knocking on Mandy’s door, about Mandy pacing in her kitchen. She picked up the mX and flicked through pages of city news: drugged-out footballers, reality-television celebrity makeovers, alcohol-induced fights in the CBD.
Sarah loved living in the city centre. It was five years since she’d bought the apartment and the thrill hadn’t worn off. For most people the city was an artificial place, all concrete and steel, somewhere they went to for work, for entertainment, for shopping. It wasn’t the real world. At the end of each excursion, they returned to the real world, to the suburbs, to their homes and their gardens. At night, while thousands vacated the city, like birds flying south for the winter, Sarah came home to it.
In Swanston Street, the air throbbed with voices. On the edges of the footpath outside McDonald’s, a group of young people strutted and smoked and ate hamburgers and fries. Three cops, wearing pistols and batons around their waists, slowed their pace as they reached the group. Sarah was reminded of the standoffs in the old Westerns her father watched when she was a child, and how she hadn’t understood, still didn’t understand, why men chose to walk towards fights instead of away from them.
Further along Swanston, two young Japanese women were setting up a jewellery stall. Sarah slowed but didn’t stop. The earrings and rings were made by embedding torn magazine images between resin — cherry blossoms, Mount Fuji, the Eiffel Tower, an open book, letters of the alphabet. Next, there was another stall, a long table spread with trinkets and bright woven scarves from Nepal.
Several beggars sat in the doorways of closed shops. One, a young woman who looked about Jo’s age, had a pleading note on cardboard — Nowhere to sleep tonight, no money for food — and was sharing her square of cardboard with a black-and-white cat. There was a collar around the cat’s neck from which hung a long leash. Sarah dropped several coins in the woman’s plate. She rarely t
alked to any of the beggars, but they were as familiar to her as neighbours might be to those living in the suburbs. People rushed past them in a hurry to get home, to cook dinner, to sit in the living rooms of their suburban houses to watch endless hours of television. To avoid seeing the beggars, to avoid the reminder that life could turn bad and go wrong, that everything could be lost. The stench of misfortune and tragedy clung to the beggars. Most people found it repulsive. Sarah was used to it; her clients were generally the kinds of people other people shunned.
In front of Gopals, the aroma of hot curry wafted onto the street. She made a quick decision and climbed up the stairs. Bugger the diet. There was a queue at the counter, mainly international students from India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Sarah lined up and waited. When it was her turn, she ordered pumpkin curry, dhal, rice, and a mango lassi, paid for her food, and took her tray to one of the bench seats overlooking Swanston Street. Across the road the town hall sparkled under blue lights. Two doormen in dinner suits (or were they well-disguised bouncers?) stood on each side of a narrow red carpet that stretched up the steps.
Swanston Street was closed to vehicle traffic in the early 1990s, the footpath widened to encourage more pedestrians. As far as Sarah was concerned, they could ban all cars. A city with no cars. Venice, without the canals and the sinking buildings, without the decay and the damp. When Sarah was six years old, her parents took the family to Europe. Her memory of Venice was of pouring rain and rising water, of lines of people on narrow trestles above the flooded piazza, of travellers taking their shoes off and running through the murky water, of locals in thigh-high gumboots and the persistent stench of soggy socks. Of her mother’s refusal to leave the hotel room.
Sarah pulled Jo’s police statement out of her bag and opened it. All of us were drinking. Jo wanted to share her guilt and blame with the others. Sarah sympathised. The guilt must be overwhelming, and to some extent all four girls were implicated. The other three had climbed into Jo’s car knowing Jo had been drinking. But the law didn’t care: Jo was the one driving, so she was culpable and she’d have to pay. Even though she was already paying. Even though she would be paying for the rest of her life.
The restaurant was full now. Did all those people know their world could change in a moment, in an instant, with one wrong move? There were some days when Sarah thought she should’ve chosen another profession, where at least occasionally she’d meet people who were happy, who she, in the line of her work, could make happy. A travel agent, say — organising people’s holidays, helping them plan their visits to exotic places, to get away from their lives.
Working in a supermarket and raising a child alone didn’t leave Mandy with spare cash. If Mandy and Jo went on holidays, Sarah assumed it was to the popular beaches of Rosebud or Rye, maybe to Lorne or Anglesea. A weekend camping in a caravan park or by a lake or a river. These were the sorts of holidays Sarah’s friend Jess had gone on. While Sarah was in Europe, Jess slept in tents, ate baked beans and sausages, and went fishing and surfing. When they came back to school and compared holiday stories, Jess said she was jealous of Sarah. Jess begged her parents to take her overseas, but Sarah hated the hotel rooms, and having to share with her parents and brothers. Massive churches populated by frightening statues of Gods and saints, and so many museums and galleries, and her mother telling her she was such a lucky girl to be learning about history and art, and was she savouring it? She preferred school to holidays. Even when her father declared a ‘rest day’, usually so he could take her brothers to a soccer or cricket match, she’d be stuck shopping with her mother, who found antique stores in every city and town, no matter how small or remote. Sarah would’ve been a terrible travel agent.
By the time she left Gopals, the rush hour was over and the workers in a hurry to get home had been replaced by couples holding hands, friends going out to dinner or for a drink in one of the expensive bars hidden down laneways or on the top floors of converted commercial buildings. Sarah loved to walk, especially at dusk; she could walk around the city for hours. But she was a faller and had to be cautious. Raised footpaths, cracked bitumen, and loose gravel often caught Sarah unawares. A tendency to trip, slip, spill. Falling to the ground. Missing steps and failing to take gutters into account. Cobblestones, slate, any uneven ground. Her ankles twisted. Weak foundations. It wasn’t a chronic condition, but it required attention. She had to watch her step. Over the years there had been multiple scraped knees and twisted ankles, bruised arms and hands. She’d split her lip, cracked a couple of teeth, and broken her left arm in two places. So the walking she loved was laced with fear and foreboding.
Even as a child she’d frequently fallen. Her falls drove her mother — netballer, runner, and, more recently, golfer — mad. A woman with excellent balance, she didn’t understand Sarah’s lack of it. ‘You don’t take after me or your father.’ This was one of the only times Sarah heard her mother say anything positive about her father. ‘When he was young he could run so fast that everyone wanted him on their team.’
‘Watch your feet,’ was Sarah’s grandmother’s advice. She was a faller too.
It was the blood that bothered Sarah’s mother. When Sarah came home in tears, with blood dripping down her leg or arm, her mother tried to be sympathetic. If Sarah came home long after the fall, her clothes torn and stained with dry blood, crusty scabs forming on her skin, sympathy was impossible. ‘Not again.’
‘It’s not my fault. It was an accident.’
After each fall, Sarah undressed in the bathroom and sat on the side of the bath while her mother washed the sores with cottonbuds and hot water, and dabbed them with Dettol. Sarah ground her teeth, clenched her fists, and bit down hard on her tongue, but she didn’t cry, not even when the sting seemed unbearable; it was her fault, after all, for being careless, for taking after her grandmother.
Sarah walked with too careful a step for a woman her age. Her eyes were on her feet. Walking this way, it was possible to cover kilometres and see nothing. Nothing but the cracks and stains of the bitumen. Nothing but the litter: cigarette butts, lolly wrappers, crushed soft drink cans, and flattened bottle tops. If the fear took control, and it did sometimes, the possibility of falling would rise like a fever, like a blush, like a panic. And walking took a force of will.
Sarah had been avoiding the West Gate for years. But Jo had crashed under the bridge, and for Sarah to understand what had happened and the details in the police report, she needed to visit the accident site.
The next morning, Sarah headed for the bridge. She left the car across the road. It wasn’t possible to park under the bridge — the scaffolding for the maintenance works was a complex web, metal towers rising to grip concrete piers. A crippled bridge: cracked, overloaded, tired. Built in the 1970s to take the city into the next century, it was now carrying a volume of traffic that many said was beyond its capacity.
‘They’re not adding on,’ said her engineer brother, Paul, at one of their fortnightly family dinners. ‘You can’t add on to a bridge. They’re narrowing all the lanes to create an extra lane each way.’
‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ her mother said.
‘But won’t that make driving on the bridge more dangerous?’ Sarah asked.
‘No evidence of that,’ he said. ‘It’s like airlines reducing the space between seats.’
‘That’s proven to be dangerous — what about thrombosis?’ Sarah’s other brother, Jake, said.
‘It might be dangerous,’ her father announced, ‘but they won’t publish any of those findings.’
‘Engineers aren’t the enemy,’ Paul said. ‘We give you what you want. No one wants to be stuck in traffic.’
The dinner-table banter went on and on, as it usually did. But Sarah was haunted by her brother’s comment: We give you what you want. Did anyone ever explain the consequences of giving people what they wanted? Would people, would whole communities, cities, countries, reje
ct progress if they knew the consequences? Was that what engineers and scientists were afraid of?
It was after ten and the traffic on the bridge was flowing. It was sunny, but not yet hot. Under the bridge, the mangroves were alive with birds. A group of older cyclists flew past, their voices as loud and bright as the lycra pants and shirts they wore. In the distance a couple were jogging, their Irish wolfhound, the size of a small pony, galloping towards a fisherman sitting on the banks of the river. The fisherman laughed and patted the dog as if they were old friends.
Sarah gazed up at the bridge and thought about Ada falling. Driving her mother’s brown Nissan to the top, pulling over to the emergency lane, making sure the note was on the dashboard, stepping out onto the roadway, climbing the barrier, and falling. Falling into the river.
There are two types of jumpers, Sarah had read in a report about suicides off the West Gate: those who hesitate and those who don’t.
Ada didn’t hesitate. The cops told the family that the VicRoads security staff weren’t able to reach her in time.
‘They don’t jump,’ a cop told her once. He didn’t know about Ada. They were in a meeting at police headquarters in the city, and the chairperson had called for a short tea break. She wanted to run away from him. ‘Everyone uses that expression, “jump off the bridge”, but they don’t jump. They sit or stand on the barrier and they let themselves fall.’
The Bridge Page 22
