The Making of Christina

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The Making of Christina Page 28

by Meredith Jaffe


  When she was done, she took the sandy path that wound down to the water, hoping to catch Bianca. Scanning the empty beach, she swallowed her disappointment and sat on the rocks to catch her breath. In summers past, the kids sat right here with a hand-held line dreaming of catching dinner. Or they’d search the rockpools for tiny blue periwinkles to drop into the sea anemones’ red bellies, tricking them into closing up their tentacles. When they grew bored, they’d tear down to the little kiosk on the wharf and console themselves with ice-creams. They travelled as a mob: Bianca, Izzy, Tom, Maddy and her sisters. Meanwhile, the three mums lolled about on the banana lounges drinking Cosmopolitans and reading well-thumbed paperbacks from the glass-fronted bookcase. In the background, the kids squabbled over Trouble, Uno or Cluedo. They were lazy sun-filled communal days. At night Della battered fish whilst Christina parboiled the potatoes for chips. Mary-Lou kept them well lubricated with bubbles or pinot depending on the time of year.

  Christina walked the sliver of sand along the tidal beach, picking up plastic straws and bottle caps, the flotsam jetsam that drifted to shore from the sailing boats a certain sort of people weekended on – the sort who loved people like Jackson.

  Her pocket vibrated. It was Anne Rushmore.

  The detective cut to the chase. ‘We’ve charged him with three counts of aggravated sexual assault, four counts of inciting a minor to commit acts of indecency and two counts of being in possession of illegal images. It’s a beginning not the end. We hope to add to the charges as our investigation continues but it was enough meat on the bones for the magistrate to take the matter seriously.’

  ‘What did Jackson say?’

  Anne Rushmore hesitated before answering. ‘He’s denied all charges.’

  ‘He what?’ Anger burned a hole in Christina’s stomach. ‘He’s saying Bianca’s lying?’

  Silence. For a moment Christina thought the line had dropped out but then the detective said, ‘No, he’s saying you made the whole thing up.’

  ‘Me? Are you serious?’

  ‘He says you put Bianca up to it.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘Calm down, Christina. His behaviour falls into the category of the best form of defence is attack.’

  She picked up a stick and stabbed holes into the sand. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘The magistrate has granted him bail on a two hundred thousand dollar surety. He has to hand in his passport and report to Kitchener police station in person three times a week.’

  Christina feels panic bubbling inside her. ‘Two hundred thousand isn’t enough. He’s got that in cash.’

  ‘Mmmm, but the magistrate feels handing in his passport is enough of a deterrent.’ The detective paused, waiting for Christina’s objection but she was too busy stabbing holes in the sand. ‘I promise you, Christina, he’d be a fool to breach his bail conditions.’

  Christina spun the stick into the sea and watched it splash down past the buoys. A flock of seagulls scattered skywards, their white wings finding purchase in the air and carrying them away. She envied them.

  ‘How’s Bianca holding up?’

  Christina wished she knew. All she could share were her observations. ‘She’s pretty quiet. Anxious. What do I tell her?’

  ‘That he’s out on bail but not to worry.’

  Christina snorted.

  ‘If he tries to make contact with either of you, call me or 000 straight away.’

  Somehow that information failed to be of comfort. How naive Christina had been to think that the system shared her moral outrage. DS Rushmore was no doubt dealing with tens if not hundreds of crimes. The officer could not devote all her time to protecting them. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘Sit tight. Expect a call from the social workers. I’ve asked them to make you both an appointment. It will do you good to get this off your chest. I’ll need to talk to Bianca again but I’ll let you know when we’re ready.’

  Christina wished she could talk to Bianca but every morning Bianca slipped out of the house to run the tracks that skirted the bay. Christina waited for her return, formulating the conversations they would have when Bianca came back, only to watch her disappear first into the shower and then into her bedroom where she claimed she studied. Christina buried the hurt that came with the knowledge that Bianca was avoiding her but she knew the point was looming where they must talk.

  She waited for Bianca to run, shower and shut her bedroom door. Waited for her to emerge some hours later when hunger finally drove Bianca into the kitchen. Christina watched Bianca slather sticks of celery with peanut butter, put them on a plate and as she turned to leave, Christina grabbed the opportunity.

  ‘Bianca, we need to tell your father and your grandparents what has happened.’

  Bianca stiffened. Christina didn’t blame her. It wasn’t the kind of news anyone relished sharing. But with Jackson charged, it was time. Since Bianca’s revelations, Christina had continued to ring her parents weekly, glad she’d had an excuse not to tell them. Now she did not.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, but we have to. I have to.’

  Bianca had scraped her hair into a ponytail. It drew attention to her cheekbones, how thin her face had become. She said nothing, just walked to her room and locked the door.

  Talking to her mother, Christina stumbled over the words until she could think of nothing more to say. What scared her the most was Rosa’s silence. In the background she could hear Massimo asking, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’

  Rosa drew a ragged breath. ‘They gonna throw that miserable son of a bitch in gaol?’

  Christina sagged under the weight of her mother’s lack of comprehension. ‘Mama, they can’t put him in gaol until he’s found guilty.’

  ‘What do you mean? His guilty. His gotta go to gaol,’ Rosa shouted.

  Christina held the phone away from her ear. ‘It’s not that simple, Mama.’

  ‘They better. I’ll kill him with my bare hands otherwise. Gaol’s the safest place for him.’

  Christina couldn’t face any more of Mama’s village sense of justice, she asked for her father. She told him their story and wept with the telling.

  ‘You need to come home,’ Massimo said.

  ‘We can’t, Papa, it’s not possible. The police won’t let us.’

  ‘You need to come home.’

  Christina sobbed. ‘I’m sorry, Papa. I’m so sorry.’

  After the tension of waiting for the police to formalise their investigation, then Jackson’s arrest and their flight from Bartholomews Run, Christina had expected the pace of the weeks that followed to continue with the same intensity. Instead, two weeks after they’d arrived at Hoopers Bay, Anne Rushmore gave Bianca the all-clear to return to school. Bianca was so relieved to be returning to Valley View, she barely managed to wave goodbye to her mother. Christina smiled and wished Bianca well but despaired at having to let her daughter out of her sight. An irrational fear consumed her that she may never see her daughter again and she gasped with the shock of it.

  Without Bianca, Christina’s life was rudderless. She was used to running her days by schedules and to-do lists. Now the only item on her list was WAIT. Worse than that, time on her hands allowed Christina to torment herself with the ever-growing list of her personal failings. Not just the years at Bartholomews Run but the whole relationship came under scrutiny. Whichever way she cast the light upon her past, it revealed a series of poor choices. Della had been right when she’d said choosing Jackson had been the wrong kind of happiness. Christina had been selfish and stupid and made foolish by love. For that there was no forgiveness.

  Every day she walked the strip of sand along the tidal beach and collected the rubbish. Sometimes she waded out into the shallows to scoop up a tangle of fishing line or a floating can. Christina made sure she always carried a plastic shopping bag in which to store
her seaside scraps. If the tide was far enough out, she’d venture around to the next little beach and clean it up too. It filled the hours left empty by the glacial pace of the justice system. Sometimes it even let her mind rest. Precious moments of peace which she did not deserve but nevertheless gave her some respite.

  Bianca refused to be enticed from her sanctuary at school for weekends at Hoopers Bay. Fear or the desire to avoid her mother, Christina did not know. Della popped in once or twice a week, bringing way too much food for lunch, enough to keep Christina fed for a week. Christina was grateful, walking the trails around the bay, holed up away from the world. The thought of facing the real world made her sick with anxiety.

  The case made its way inexorably up the judicial ladder. First the suburban magistrates court which sent the case straight to the district court where all serious charges were heard. Each time Christina’s spirits rose at the development, each time they were dashed as inertia replaced the sporadic flurry of activity. Jackson’s lawyers compounded the long wait by finding a myriad of excuses to delay or change dates. Eventually, though, they could not stop the legal system processing the next step.

  DS Rushmore and the Crown Prosecutor Katie Sommers warned them that the purpose of the arraignment was to formally read the charges to the defendant and for the prosecution to outline their case to the judge. No witnesses would be called. There was no jury. The judge alone would determine if there was sufficient evidence to make the expense and time of a trial worthwhile.

  Even so, being there in Justice Grainger’s courtroom felt every bit as if Jackson was at last forced to face what he had done. As they congregated there on that day, Christina and Bianca, Rosa and Massimo, Jamie and Della, for the first time it felt as if justice was about to be served. Jackson sat in the middle of the table and his team was so large that one of their number had to borrow a chair from the prosecution table. Christina searched for Bianca’s hand and gripped it tight.

  Christina watched Katie Sommers stand and hand a single sheet of paper to the clerk who then passed it up to Justice Grainger. Waited as the judge read through the list of charges then, passing the sheet back to the clerk, said, ‘Arraign the accused.’

  Christina willed herself to listen as the clerk read the first of the charges. ‘Jackson Plummer, you are charged that on the afternoon of 14 May . . .’

  The words lacerated her as charge after charge was read out, as time and again Jackson pleaded, ‘Not guilty.’ This was the first time Christina had heard the intimate details of Jackson’s assaults. At first she was numb with the shock of them, but this soon melted away to anger. She glanced at Bianca, surprised that she looked so composed. Then Christina noticed the crushed water bottle in her hands.

  It was not long after lunch that Justice Grainger delivered his decision. ‘In the event the accused pleads not guilty, it is for the court to decide whether the case is sufficiently robust to withstand the stress and considerable expense of a full-scale trial by jury.’

  He emphasised the word ‘expense’, glaring at the man who stood before him with a disrespectful puff of his chest. Justice Grainger turned a grave and weary face to the court.

  Christina pressed her hand to her breast. How many cases had DS Rushmore said made it beyond this point? Three? Four? The odds were so small. If the judge decided against them, Bianca was putting herself through hell for nothing.

  The judge’s voice rolled across the room. ‘Based on the prima facie case presented to this court, it is my view that the accused faces a reasonable chance of conviction in front of a jury of his peers.’ He turned to the defence table. ‘Do you agree, Mr Kent?’

  All eyes pinned Jackson’s barrister to the spot, except for Christina’s. Hers were glued to Jackson as if he might disappear in a magnesium flash and a puff of smoke.

  David Kent squared his shoulders and, without a glance at his client, faced the judge. ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  A ripple of surprise spread across the courtroom. Bianca’s hands flew to her mouth and suppressed a sob. Della hugged Christina, who looked for a reaction from Jackson and saw a man stunned by this turn of events. Christina saw the angry frown directed at the man supposed to represent his interest and knew he never expected the case to get this far. His public acclamations of innocence were as much to convince himself as they were to convince others. How shocked he must be that his wealth and power had failed to protect him from the law. His face turned blank, she concluded, because Jackson had no way of expressing his disbelief.

  Justice Grainger raised his voice to silence the room. ‘In which case, I send this matter to trial.’

  For days after the arraignment, Christina felt free. She slept, she ate, she took her long walks around the bay, each step bouncing on the sandy paths, buoyed by the optimism that maybe Bianca was going to be counted amongst the one in ten. But once the initial relief wore off, Christina realised that with Justice Grainger setting a trial date three months from now, nothing much had changed at all. She still had nothing better to fill her days other than with long walks around the headland or dips in the bay, too cool yet for more leisurely swims. On Sunday nights she rang Bianca at Valley View but rarely caught her. When she did speak to her, Bianca’s answers were little more than a word here or there. If Christina tried to offer words of support about the upcoming trial, Bianca cut her off and changed the subject. Christina came to dread the phone calls. Bianca was slipping away from her, unable or unwilling to pick up the threads of their relationship. She feared that even if Jackson was found guilty, the damage she had done to her relationship with Bianca was irreparable.

  Rosa rang Christina every day. The conversations tended to go along the same lines. ‘What are the police doing about that sonnofabitch?’

  ‘There’s not much they can do until the trial, Mama.’

  ‘His lucky he was dealing with the police because if I ever get my hands on him I’ll string him up by his heels and beat him with a switch until his got no skin left.’

  Christina flinched, examining her own skin where the rash flashed and burned its path, the blisters weeping, the excruciating itch.

  It was through Rosa that Christina heard the details of Bianca’s life. Her mother spoke to Bianca quite often by the sounds of it. Although what they spoke of, she did not always ask. It felt like trespassing. She knew Rosa sent panforte and jars of peaches ‘because she’s too skinny’. They’d talk of Bianca’s academic progress, her photography, studying these fragments Bianca gave them for clues as to her state of mind.

  Christina’s phone calls to Mrs Hardcastle offered little more reassurance. Bianca was a little withdrawn but that was understandable in the circumstances. She was eating, sleeping better. DS Rushmore agreed, although Christina had stopped asking her direct questions about the case, constrained by the fact that she was a witness and, as DS Rushmore reminded her, Bianca was the person with whom they were obliged to communicate.

  Justice Grainger had, in his own way, vindicated that a crime had been committed. Forget emotionally or morally, legally there was a case to answer and in some way it shifted something within Christina. Having hidden herself away at Hoopers Bay, she now wanted to get out and interact with people in a normal way. As if now there was a trial date she could look people in the eye.

  In the months that followed the arraignment, she made it her habit once a week to drive to Mona Vale for a cup of real coffee and supplies. Mary-Lou had said she was entitled to an allowance from Jackson and that he had to continue paying Bianca’s school fees. Mary-Lou had asked for a thousand dollars a week; Jackson’s solicitor had countered with two hundred and they had settled on four. Every time Christina withdrew money for coffee, for petrol, for food, Jackson paid for it, but she didn’t have to feel guilty for long. As soon as Justice Grainger set the trial date, Jackson cut off all funds and refused to respond to any of the court applications Mary-Lou filed. He didn’t care about
the contempt of court notices. This was a high-stakes game and Christina knew from Jackson’s business dealings how ruthless he could be when he had a lot invested in the outcome.

  She found a park outside the library. Reading allowed many hours of escape from the relentless monotony of her life. Christina put her books in the return chute and went downstairs to fiction. She avoided crime and romance. She had no appetite for either. After the library, she bought a coffee and crossed the road to the fruit and veg shop.

  ‘Morning, Andy!’ she called out.

  From the dark back room of the greengrocer’s appeared Andy carrying a sack of purple onions over his shoulder. Dropping them to the floor, he spread his arms, saying, ‘Christina! How ya going?’ and planted a kiss on her cheek.

  The citrus scent of his aftershave lingered. She wondered what he would say if she told him he was the only man who had touched her in months. How the roughness of his stubble against her cheek abraded her loneliness. She bought a couple of tomatoes, a bag of lettuce. A pile of mangoes drew her eyes and although they were a luxury, she could not resist. She paid Andy and let him carry the bags to the door of his shop. She knew that when she returned to Hoopers Bay there would be more than she paid for. Sometimes Andy slipped in a head of garlic or an eggplant. For their own reasons, they both pretended not to notice.

  Christina finished her rounds at the supermarket. After paying, she followed the ramp down to the parking station away from the scorching summer heat. Her eyes took a while to adjust to the sudden change in light but there were few cars at this time of day and the Range Rover was easy to spot in the corner. Throwing the bag of books in the footwell, she made a nest out of a beach towel on the passenger side for the mangoes.

 

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