‘They laughed so much when they were together. I loved to see them so happy.’ Paolina leant against Antonello. He stroked her head gently.
The mystery of friendship. The randomness with which the two girls, so different, had found each other and become friends. And a memory returned to him, of a Sunday afternoon after a soccer match, he and Slav and Sam caked in mud and sweat, sitting on a bench outside the clubrooms. They’d lost the game, but they were happy. Slav, the best player of the three, the one that a league coach approached and invited to try out for the state team, was the least concerned. ‘I don’t care that much about soccer,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t play with you two.’
Sam hit Slav hard on the arm. ‘What are you trying to say there, mio mate?’ Having adopted ‘mate’, Sam used it to refer to everyone, but with an Italian emphasis: ‘ehi mate’ or ‘mio mate’.
Slav pretended to be knocked over by the hit. ‘Come on, Sam. I know Australians who can play soccer better than you.’
‘Would you like a coffee?’ Antonello asked Paolina. She nodded. He put the pot on and went over to the fridge for milk. On the door, there were photographs of Jane and Ashleigh, and one of Ashleigh and Jo, the two girls dancing at Ashleigh’s eighteenth birthday party. Ashleigh was caught in mid movement, her arms swinging. Ashleigh, with her mother’s pale skin and oval face. Jo’s features were more Italian than Ashleigh’s. Occasionally when they were out with the girls, people mistook Jo for their granddaughter. Ashleigh was thinner and more athletic. She was shorter too, and recently she’d started to wear those ridiculously high heels.
‘Killer heels,’ Antonello had teased Ashleigh at the party. ‘Well, at least if you get into trouble, you can use them as a weapon.’ The memory was so sad it choked him. But he didn’t stop breathing. Paolina didn’t stop breathing. Alex and Rae, they were still breathing. And Jane. Everyone else except Ashleigh was breathing.
Antonello removed photographs that included Jo from the fridge and shoved them in the back of a corner drawer, behind birthday candles and matchboxes, business cards and brochures, paper clips and picture hooks.
Chapter 10
Sharp slivers of light pierced the room. A yearning for darkness propelled Jo out of bed and to the window. Trembling, she yanked the curtains shut and crawled back under the bedcovers, eyes closed, knees to chin. Cocooned. She should be crying, weeping, sobbing, but she hadn’t shed a tear, not one. Acid mouth. Stomach cramps. The night had been a series of runs to the bathroom, three or four times. Heaving and puking in the darkness. The stink of vomit and bile trailing her through the house. Her body rotting from the inside.
Her mother hadn’t come to her. Not once.
Loud and ponderous and unstoppable, the world was awake. Heavy trucks, grunting and grinding, sped towards the refineries and the wharves, Coode Island, the West Gate. The sounds reverberated around the house. Boom-gate bells. Factory sirens. A ship’s foghorn. Mrs Nguyễn’s alsatian, Wes, barking and Bob’s mongrel Lupie responding. The rattle of a wheelie bin rolled out to the curb. Mr Johnson’s hacking morning cough.
Shut the fuck up. Stop. The day was coming, unwavering, relentless. It didn’t care about her or Ash.
Once, not long ago, she had joined her neighbours and the local environmental group to demonstrate against the truck traffic, the refineries, the capitalist pigs who run big business and don’t give a shit about community. Fifty-three people, several children, and a dozen or so dogs camped on the footpath along Francis Street on a cold April night to highlight the uselessness of the truck curfew. They spread out sleeping bags and old foam mattresses, and every time a truck drove past they yelled and blew whistles and banged pots and took photographs of licence plates. Jo fell asleep. Mandy told Mrs Nguyễn, ‘Jo can sleep through anything.’
On weekday mornings, Jo resented having to get up for school and not having enough time to sleep. This morning Jo wouldn’t get up. She wouldn’t get dressed. She wouldn’t argue with her mother as they ate their breakfast. She wouldn’t run all the way to Ash’s house and knock on the door so they could go to school together. No more Ash. Not ever.
Ash dead. It was impossible. Not true. A bad dream. A nightmare. Clutching the twisted sheets, Jo ached for her mother, to crawl into the warmth of her mother’s bed, to be embraced by her mother, encircled in her arms. For Mandy’s welcome. Did you have a bad dream, darling?
All night sleep mocked her. Not sleep. A state of semi-consciousness, out of which she was jolted when she remembered Ash was dead. And a swell rising… a hard fist in the belly, and rivers of heat burning in her throat. The wheel slipping, the car skidding and skating and spinning and spinning. Body bounding and head whirling, and time slowing, and the screams. And more screams, and slamming the brake down hard. The car soaring. And crashing, amplified and vibrating and so close.
Again and again, the screams. The sirens. The police. The ambulance. The ringing in her ears.
‘The young woman in the front seat didn’t survive the accident.’
Dead.
Laura and Mani were yelling and screaming. Laura and Mani were sobbing. Smashed glass and metal strewn across the road. The fluttering lights on the bridge. The half moon. Men talking, calling out, yelling. The clang of chains. Flashing orange lights. Horns and sirens. Alarms.
And darkness, black and thick.
‘Open your eyes.’ A paramedic. Lying still. ‘She’s fine. Nothing broken.’
‘Concussion?’ Emergency Room lights, rolling corridors.
The memories coming in a rapid stream. Surging. Spilling. Spewing.
A cubicle. A nurse pulling the curtains across, glaring at her with scorn. ‘She can wait. She’s fine. To look at her you wouldn’t know there’d been an accident.’
Police, doctors, nurses, questions.
‘You understand the test is to check your blood alcohol concentration. You have to consent to the test. Do you understand?’
‘You understand that the young woman who was in the front seat, Ashleigh, is dead. Do you understand?’
No, I don’t understand. No, she isn’t dead.
Was it possible to erase everything, to make it not true, a lie?
Blood test. A syringe. Drawing of blood.
‘To look at her you wouldn’t know there’d been an accident.’
‘Drunk?’
‘Looks like it. Smells like it.’
Mandy holding the curtain aside. Standing half in and half out.
Nothing. Not a word. Mandy silent, refusing to meet her eye.
Please yell at me.
How did they get home? Was it the back of a taxi? A police car? Falling, falling into her bed. Her head drowning in memories and nightmares.
‘The passenger in the front seat is dead.’
‘Your friend is dead.’
‘You killed Ash.’
Ash is dead.
At 7.00 am, the alarm triggered the radio. Jo hit the off button with a hard thump. At the café they’d be opening up soon. Ted and the staff… did they know about the accident? News travelled fast in Yarraville. The morning regulars arriving with their dogs, their iPhones and earplugs, on their way back from boot camp at the park or their Pilates class, lining up even before the coffee machine was fired up. The sweep of gossip between orders, patrons picking up fragments. Soon they’d hear about the accident. Just a story to them. There would be shock, horror. There would be pity and fury.