‘No, it’s fine. I guess I’ve just been lucky up to now. No one I know has died. No friends or family members, not even grandparents. So I don’t know what … how to be.’
‘I don’t think anyone knows what to do or how to be, even if they’ve had lots of experience with grief. It’s tough, especially when it’s an accident and so unexpected. Especially because Ashleigh was so young.’
‘My parents are angry at both Ash and Jo. Even though they don’t say it.’
‘Did Jo and Ashleigh drink a lot?’
‘They … Everybody drinks. Ash and Jo didn’t drink much during the week — hardly at all. Only on the weekend, when we went out.’
‘Did Jo often drive on those nights?’
‘I usually drove.’
‘But when you weren’t there?’
‘Yes, I guess she did. Obviously she did. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time.’
‘What kind of person would you say Jo is?’
‘She’s a good person. I mean, I don’t think she would’ve done anything to hurt Ash on purpose, if that’s what you mean?’
‘What else can you tell me about her, her personality?’
‘She’s a bit clingy and anxious, and sometimes it pissed Ash off.’
‘So they fought.’
‘I don’t know. I never saw them fighting. I was shocked when I heard they were fighting that night. Ash would vent sometimes, but not at Jo.’
‘About Jo?’
‘Ash was happy-go-lucky, positive.’ Kevin paused and put his cup down. ‘Not much worried Ash. But Jo got anxious. I understand; I do too. Ash would get pissed off with her. She’d say Jo was needy, annoying. She’d say stuff but then send Jo a text to tell her what we were doing — like, a hundred texts a day, as if nothing was real until she had told Jo. I don’t know, I never understood. Girls have different kinds of friendships to guys.’
‘Have you talked to Jo since the accident?’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t tried to see her or talk to her?’
‘I sent her a text message after the accident. I wanted to talk about Ash. She didn’t reply … But I saw her. Last week I rode my bike to the bridge. It was an insane thing to do, it took me an hour and a half, and I was so stuffed I had to take the train back. But driving there didn’t seem right, and I wanted to go there. It’s weird, but I thought I could talk to Ash there. When Jo saw me, she turned around and raced off into the reserve, couldn’t get away fast enough. So I figure she’s not ready to talk. It sorta sucks, because it’d help to talk to Jo about Ash.’
Sarah sighed. When she thought about the impact that Kevin’s statement, if he were prepared to make one on Jo’s behalf, might have on the sentencing judge — if any — she wasn’t sure it was worth putting him through the pain of having to write one.
There were now two groups of men on the golf course, and their voices wafted across to the garden. ‘So you didn’t get to talk to Jo at all, that day?’
‘No. I didn’t follow her. I stayed awhile. I read the names of the men who died when the bridge collapsed. They’re engraved on a plaque down there. There are lots of workmen on the bridge at the moment, doing some major reconstruction. How do you reckon they feel, working on the bridge knowing all those other blokes died?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Sarah said. ‘Most of the guys working on the bridge now probably don’t even know about the collapse.’
‘Ash’s grandfather was working on the bridge when it collapsed. Did you know that?’ Sarah shook her head. ‘He was there when it collapsed and he lost mates … the weekend before she died Ash told me about it, and about how her grandfather won’t drive across the bridge. She’d only found out recently, when she asked him if they could go over the bridge for a driving lesson and he refused. We talked about how a tragedy might change people, how it might be worse for the ones who survive. It’s so weird that we were talking about it and then for Ash to … for the accident to happen there.’ He paused. ‘It’s been two months since her funeral. I haven’t been to work or out with friends. I can’t think about anything else. I can’t concentrate on anything else. How did the men who survived move on? How did they go on living their lives?’
Kevin said he wasn’t a talker. He was the shy and nerdy type, the kind who preferred to read or play computer games. But he couldn’t stop talking. Sarah understood that impulse. After Ada died, she wanted to tell everyone about her. She said Ada’s name over and over again. She inched her into every conversation. She wanted to tell everyone she talked to that this wonderful woman was gone. She wanted others to experience the loss — everyone she knew, everyone she met, especially all those people who hadn’t known Ada and now wouldn’t have a chance to meet her. She’d been zealous. Driven by anger and grief, but also by guilt. The truth was, she’d known Ada was depressed, that she was descending into a dark and narrow place, that she was lost and alone; she knew Ada was heading for a fall, and she’d done nothing.
Chapter 21
The Portarlington bus made its way through the centre of Geelong, past the hospital, and onto the highway. Jo loved driving in the country. She and Ash had talked about taking road trips along the coast. But Jo would never drive again. Never.
The other passengers were locals. The driver greeted each by name and asked after kids and elderly parents. He talked about the last Cats game and what they needed to do to make sure they were in the finals next season. He told them he found his ten-year-old son and a friend playing with matches in the field at the back of the house, about the dry grass, about getting angry and yelling at them and remembering his childhood attraction to fire and how he’d almost burnt down his father’s shed. Some of the passengers laughed.
One of the older women said, ‘Sounds like he’s taken after you.’
‘Problem is, fires catch too easy,’ said a woman in a nurse’s uniform.
Jo crouched down in her seat at the back. The sky was dark grey, but inside the bus it was hot. She took her jacket off and stared out the window. Once they left Geelong, the highway was sandwiched between farmland. There were several wineries along the way, and even from the bus she could see the vines were heavy with fruit.
Earlier that morning she’d woken up with Ash’s voice in her head. No one, not even your mother, loves you. And a beam of morning light coming in through the gap in the curtains, hitting the wall and exposing the faint outline of the jungle mural that layers of paint hadn’t been able to cover.
‘What is underneath the paint?’ she’d asked Grandpa Tom when she first saw the outline, the hints of green and yellow.
‘A mural painted by your mother and your uncle. I’ve painted over it half a dozen times, but it keeps coming back.’
‘What kind of mural?’
‘There were trees and monkeys, and I think a giraffe — your Uncle John was obsessed with giraffes. Your mother, she must have been about five at the time, and John, he would’ve been seven. They were right little rascals.’
‘Did it have birds in the trees?’
‘There were birds sitting in the branches, and rabbits running around the base.’
‘Did it have snakes?’ Jo had recently seen her first snake on a walk along Stony Creek. Mandy had spotted it. ‘An eastern garter snake,’ she had whispered. The snake was striped, grey and yellow, and coiled so that its head and tail were almost touching.
‘No snakes that I can remember,’ Grandpa Tom said, shaking his head.
‘Were you angry?’
‘I laughed, but your grandmother almost blew a fuse, and I was in the biggest trouble of all for laughing.’
That morning, staring at the wall, with Grandpa Tom’s voice in her head, she’d been overwhelmed with despair. Wherever he and Pop Jack were, they were ashamed of her now.
When she heard Mandy leave for work, she had dressed and pa
cked a few clothes. She turned her phone on for the first time in weeks and put it on to charge. Almost immediately, insistent beeping announced new messages: from Laura, from Ruby at the café, from Mrs Hunt, from her father, from Ash … from Ash’s phone …
You are a murderer.
You fucking killed Ashleigh. You stupid bitch, you should be dead.
Her stomach churned. She felt her heart beating faster. Someone in Ash’s family wanted her dead. Maybe everyone wanted her dead. She read the messages again, and a third time. It was true, she was a murderer. She understood, she agreed. She should be dead. But she wasn’t. She turned the phone off, pulled it off the charge, and threw it onto the bed.
She took her bag and left the house without turning back.
At the station, the next train was headed for Geelong, due in six minutes. That was where she’d go, then. On the train she spent the whole hour staring out the window into the backyards of the houses lining the railway track as they sped through Yarraville and Newport, through the flat open fields on either side of Werribee, through Little River and Lara, until they finally reached the outskirts of Geelong. She tried not to think, but her head was swarming with the voices.
When the train arrived at the Geelong station, she was relieved to be able to move. At the bus terminal, several vehicles were waiting. She took the St Leonards bus. Portarlington was a vague childhood memory from a holiday with Grandpa Tom when she was four. They’d stayed in an old caravan and fished off the pier. They’d eaten chips on the beach, surrounded by squawking gulls; she’d been frightened at first, but he’d shown her how to chase them away. Mandy hadn’t come with them — she didn’t remember why. Probably working. She remembered the smell of his tobacco floating in through the open door of the caravan. The overly sweet hot chocolate he made her at night. Paddling barefoot along the water’s edge, her feet freezing. Sitting next to him on an old deck chair outside the caravan and counting the stars. Giggling at his silly stories.
By the time they arrived at the Portarlington shopping centre, it was raining heavily. Jo raced across the road to shelter under a row of shop awnings, but even with her back pressed flat up against the supermarket window, she was getting wet.
‘Torrential, this rain. But it’ll be great for my garden,’ announced one of several older women lined up next to her. She reminded Jo of a too-cheerful politician wanting to convince her constituents that recessions, unemployment, and increasing taxes all had a silver lining.
‘Yes, we need it,’ responded an old man, leaning on a walking stick. Beside him there was another elderly woman sitting on her electric scooter, and a couple with their shopping and a scruffy terrier. Jo couldn’t see another person under sixty.
The woman kept talking about the importance of a good soak for the garden, the amount of rain it took before moisture penetrated to the roots, and the pleasure it was to see all the trees, especially the older trees, refreshed.
‘We might need the rain,’ the woman in the scooter said with a hoarse laugh, ‘but I don’t have to be grateful when it comes, especially when it’s bucketing down.’
Sheets of rain were closing in on them. From the road, the bay was covered in a fine mist; there was no horizon, no city, no mountains. The pier had dissolved. The town was adrift.
Jo was weighed down with a desire to curl up and sleep, knees to chin, head buried in the folds of her arms. Since the accident she rarely slept, and when she did it was broken, shattered by nightmares, the nights more tiring than the days, and no relief in sight. But standing under the canopy surrounded by people her grandmother’s age, the possibility of sleep, its inevitability, was seductive.
‘Are you alright, love?’ The woman with the garden inched a little closer and placed her hand on Jo’s arm.
‘Sorry?’
‘You look pale, like you might faint.’
‘Oh no, I’m fine. I never faint,’ Jo replied.
‘My husband’s gone to get the car. Can we give you a lift somewhere?’ She had grey hair and wrinkles, but she wore jeans and heavy work boots. Her skin was tanned and weathered, and she reminded Jo of the colonial women in Australian movies, the ones who lived in isolated rural shacks and chopped their own wood. She might’ve been the same age as Mary, but was as unlike Jo’s grandmother as two women could be — no make-up, no lipstick, no earrings, no pastels.
‘No, not sure where I’m staying.’
‘Just arrived, have you? Are you looking for somewhere to stay, love?’
‘No … umm, yes.’ Jo had been driven by adrenaline all morning. By the inkling of an idea, to run, and then to run to Portarlington. But she had no plans, no sense at all as to what she might do now that she’d arrived.
‘We live next door to a hostel, it’s a backpackers’. They have a dorm and you can walk to the beach and into town. They’ll have a bed for sure. It’s early, not the tourist season yet. We can give you a lift, save you getting wet.’
‘I’m not … I haven’t decided —’
‘It’s nice here. You young travellers prefer the ocean coast, Lorne and Anglesea, but they’re much more expensive, and the natives aren’t as friendly.’ She laughed.
‘Hear, hear,’ said the man with the walking stick.
‘It’ll get busier here soon, love, and there’ll be work in the cafés and the restaurants.’
In the woman’s presence, Jo was transformed into a young, carefree traveller looking for work, and the sleepiness passed. She straightened up and met the woman’s gaze, returning her smile. ‘A job, yes,’ Jo said. ‘Any leads would be great.’
‘My son’s the manager at The George,’ said the old man. ‘It’s there.’ He used his walking stick to point down the street, but through the teeming rain, it was impossible to make out the individual buildings. ‘It’s a restaurant and a motel. One of his waitresses up and left. She fell in love with a young bloke from Canada, and now they’re gone north together.’
‘Was that Bella?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Lovely girl, but a little rash.’
‘More than a little rash,’ the man said. ‘She only knew the Canadian guy for a week and was packed and gone.’ He turned back to Jo. ‘Have you done any waitressing?’
‘Yes,’ Jo said, feeling herself swept up in a current that was out of her control. Did she want to stay in Portarlington? Did she want to get a job? Was she allowed to leave Yarraville? She’d have to check the conditions of her bail with Sarah. She didn’t want the police to come looking for her.
‘Well, why don’t you go down to The George and tell them I sent you. Bob’s my name.’ The man held out his hand for Jo to shake.
‘Thanks.’ Jo took his weathered hand. His grip was surprisingly strong.
‘Your name, love?’ the woman asked when Jo didn’t introduce herself.
Jo didn’t want to tell them her name. She didn’t want to be Jo Neilson the murderer, the girl who killed her best friend, the person who was on her way to prison. She wanted to be the carefree traveller, this new girl the woman had conjured up.
‘My name’s Ashleigh,’ Jo said. The words spilling out before she could stop them. Before she could push them back.
‘Well, Ashleigh, I’m Susan, Sue. My husband, Laurie, and I, we’ll drop you off at the hostel. You can book in and then come and have a bite of lunch with us. After lunch we’ll drive you back up to town.’
‘Oh, but I can’t …’
‘Sure you can. We love young company.’
Laurie drove a silver Holden Commodore. Before Jo could say anything else, she was sitting in the back seat of the car. The seats were black leather. There was a strong new-car smell, a cocktail of glues and plastics. It reminded Jo of Ash’s parents’ four-wheel drive. That was the first new car she’d ever ridden in, and the smell was overpowering. Within minutes she was nauseous, and Rae ha
d to stop the car so Jo could jump out and throw up. When Jo passed her driving test and Mary gave her the keys to Pop Jack’s car, Ash gave Jo new-car-smell spray. It was a joke, and the label, handmade by Ash, covered a normal lavender air freshener.
‘Laurie,’ Sue said, ‘this is Ashleigh.’ At the sound of Ash’s name, Jo cringed. Was it too late to take it back? Too late to tell them it wasn’t her name? Too late to stop the car and get out, go back to the city?
‘Hi, Ash,’ Laurie said.
Startled, Jo jumped in quickly. ‘Ashleigh,’ she said. ‘I don’t like being called Ash.’
‘Sorry. Bad habit I have of shortening everything.’ He wasn’t what she’d expected; he seemed too frail to be Sue’s husband. Laurie wore a crisp white shirt that called out for a tie and jacket, and frameless glasses that sat too low on his nose. His hands shook even as they gripped the steering wheel. He was the sort of man you expected to find behind a desk: a bank manager or an insurance agent. When Mary and Jack had fought, Mary would sometimes say, I should’ve married a gentleman. Laurie was exactly the kind of elderly gentleman Jo imagined her grandmother meant. He wasn’t at all like Pop Jack, who only ever wore a suit to funerals and weddings but was never comfortable in them.
‘We’ll drop her off at Bernie’s. And she’s stopping in for lunch. We’ll have those pasties and later we’ll take her down to The George. Bob says they need a waitress.’
The town’s centre was one long strip with a dozen or so shops and cafés, the supermarket and the pub, and a couple of restaurants, including The George, which was a substantial white building on the corner. Across the main road and down the hill there was the bay beach and the pier.
The hostel was a weatherboard house with a wide bullnose verandah and a rusted corrugated-steel roof. When Jo rang the doorbell, a blonde woman in her early twenties opened the door. She had a strong German accent. Once Jo explained that she was after a dorm bed, the woman introduced herself as Diane and led Jo through to the kitchen. On the table was an opened laptop, and she sat in front of it. ‘To register I need your ID.’
The Bridge Page 29
