Both the cops came back in. Constable Peters was carrying a box, from which he took a small digital recorder. As he set up the microphone, Constable Lumina settled at the table with her notepad and pen.
‘If we’re ready,’ Constable Peters said, and turned on the recorder. ‘It’s 10.10 am on the twenty-first of September 2009. Footscray Police Station. Interview with Joanne Neilson. Conducting the interview, Constable Peters and Constable Lumina. In the room, we also have Ms Neilson’s lawyer, Sarah Cascade, and Ms Neilson’s mother, Mandy Neilson.’ He looked up. ‘Jo, please state your name and your address.’
‘My name is Jo Neilson. I live at…’ Her voice was small, distant, a whisper.
‘Can you speak a little louder? And say your full name,’ Constable Peters interrupted.
She repeated her name and her address. In Jo’s head, her voice was booming. She waited for them to reel back, but no one moved. The two cops were staring at Jo. Sarah glanced up from her notebook, and even Mandy shifted in her chair so that she was facing Jo. To stop herself from fidgeting, Jo slipped her hands under her legs, like she had as a child. Back then, her legs didn’t touch the ground and she could swing her feet. She pressed down on her hands with all her weight.
‘What is your birth date?’ Constable Peters bent closer to the microphone every time he asked a question.
‘Eighth of June 1990.’
‘You are older than the other girls.’ This seemed like a statement to Jo, but when she didn’t answer, Sarah nodded in her direction.
‘The others are eighteen, or almost eighteen. I started school late.’
Jo waited for Mandy to explain, to say what she usually said about keeping Jo back from schooclass="underline" ‘It’s not that Jo was slow or anything. Her grandfather was sick.’ But Sarah shook her head and Mandy slumped back in her chair, eyes fixed on her lap.
Constable Lumina wrote notes with a fountain pen, the blue ink staining her thumb and her index finger. Running writing. Jo’s Grade 4 teacher, Mrs Morris, called it running writing. The students had to conquer the style before they were awarded a pen licence. Jo was bad at running writing. She recalled the shame of being the second-last person in the grade to qualify for her pen licence. A boy, Macka Smith, was slower, but he was a brat who couldn’t read, let alone write. Jo wasn’t good at reading upside down. She wasn’t good at reading people’s running writing. Her father and her great aunt — the aunt who lived somewhere in Canada, somewhere cold, where it snowed in the winter — sent her handwritten letters and cards. When they arrived, Mandy translated them. Not that they ever said anything interesting. Have a good birthday. Hope you have a nice Easter. All the best for Xmas. Her father wrote Christmas with an X. Her aunt spelt the whole word out. Her father’s script was small and squashed; Mandy called it ‘stingy writing’. He wrote about Jo’s brothers: Michael is the captain of the cricket team. Ed is going to start high school this year. Lists of impersonal details. He didn’t use adjectives. Her aunt wrote about gardens and travelling. In her letters, nouns were weighed down by adjectives, though her vocabulary was limited, and everything good was fabulous or stunning or so, so beautiful, and everything not so good was disappointing and unsatisfying.
‘Jo, tell us about that evening, before the accident.’ Constable Peters reached out to steady the microphone.
Jo hesitated. Where to begin? The party, the house… or further back? Did they want to know about her nerves, her anxiety, the panic she felt before Ash arrived? Or the relief when Ash agreed to come over in the afternoon to study? Or later, when she came back with champagne and her clothes: ‘Party time.’ Her warm hug. ‘A strong beginning is what catches the reader,’ Mrs Hunt had told them. The beginning is simple to mark was the first line of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love — it didn’t catch her, she wanted to give up on the novel, and in fact she did several times, wouldn’t have continued reading it if it weren’t for the exams. Those exams.
The beginning is simple to mark.
‘Jo?’
‘Where do you want me to start?’
‘What time did you get together with Ashleigh?’ Constable Lumina asked. Her voice was soft, and she leaned in to ask her questions, as if they were friends in a café exchanging intimacies.
‘Ash was at my place all afternoon, we were studying. Then she went home to get her clothes and came back at 7.30.’
‘Did you go out straightaway?’
‘No. It was too early. We did our make-up and dressed, and Mum cooked us dinner.’ Jo’s body craved her mother’s: to curl up on the couch against her mother’s body, to be held in her mother’s embrace. Mandy’s grip would be strong, her hands warm. Mandy was her anchor. But Mandy’s hands were on her lap. She had a tissue in one hand, her fist tight around it. With the other hand, she gripped her phone as if someone were threatening to snatch it.
Jo stared at the vinyl tiles, at the metal-framed chairs, at the notices on the noticeboard, at the poster for Victoria Legal Aid.
‘What did you have for dinner?’
‘Mum made eggs and toast.’
Sarah scribbled notes. Her fingers were slender, long, and fast. Her nails were short, but not shaped or filed. Sarah’s nails were like Mandy’s nails. No manicures. Ash had given Jo her first manicure when they were thirteen. They followed the step-by-step instructions in a Dolly magazine. They bought nail files and clippers, and pinched Ash’s mother’s hand creams.
How could Sarah and Constable Lumina have so much to write?
‘Did you have a drink with dinner? Alcohol?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you drink?’
‘We had a Cruiser each when we were getting ready. Later we opened a bottle of champagne that Ash brought —’
‘How much did you drink?’ Constable Peters was asking his questions in quick succession now, one after the other. His arms were folded and his eyes fixed on the digital recorder.
‘A glass each, I think.’
‘Were you drunk?’
‘I only had a couple of drinks.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘At about nine we headed off for the party.’
‘You were driving?’
‘I’m the only one with a car.’
‘Did you know you were going to be driving?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you still drank?’ Constable Lumina interrupted. In the ensuing silence, she dropped her pen. It rolled off the table onto the floor and she stood up and chased it across the room.
‘I only had a couple of drinks.’ Jo tried to count how many. A Cruiser and a glass of champagne at home. At the party she drank another Cruiser or two. A glass of champagne. Another champagne with cake, maybe two… she could count the drinks up until the cake. After that she wasn’t sure.
‘We all drank. I drove because I’m the only one with a licence and a car. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t drink that much. It’s not like I was… I don’t get that drunk. I knew what was going on.’ They didn’t believe her. She didn’t believe herself. It was true that she didn’t drink much, not compared to some. If only they knew how much some people drank.
‘You have a probationary P1 licence, is that right?’ Constable Peters asked, his eyes on her now.
‘Yes,’ Jo whispered, looking away.
‘You are aware of the conditions of that licence? You know you must have zero blood-alcohol content when driving? In other words, no drinking at all?’ He was almost shouting at her now. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’