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‘You couldn’t have stopped me,’ Jo said, but she didn’t feel any of the old resentment towards her mother.

‘But I didn’t try,’ Mandy whispered.

Chapter 11

In the hallway outside the interview room, Sarah leaned against the wall. Lately, her anger was getting the better of her, and being on a strict high-protein diet wasn’t helping. She craved sugar. She needed a cigarette. She needed a less stressful job. She needed to work with clients who weren’t idiots. Who took some responsibility for their actions.

‘Ready to go back?’ Constable Lumina asked, handing Sarah a coffee.

‘Give me a minute? I need a smoke.’

‘Sure. I’ll come out with you,’ she said, and went across to a desk that had a solitary but high stack of papers and files, opened the top drawer, and took out a packet of cigarettes. Sarah trailed after the constable, through the back door and into a small courtyard where two other cops, both men, sat on a bench smoking. The men nodded at them, and continued their own conversation.

‘These car-accident cases are tough,’ Constable Lumina said.

‘The worst,’ Sarah said as she rolled herself a cigarette. ‘So much bad stuff that happens is the result of thoughtlessness and bad luck.’

‘Not bad luck, negligence.’

‘We’re all negligent; we’re all irresponsible from time to time. Apparently, we’re being negligent right now.’ Sarah pointed to their cigarettes. Some people, like her mother, thought she was negligent because she was fat. ‘You’ll regret it when you’re older,’ her mother said. ‘When your knees go, when you have diabetes and high blood pressure, it’ll be your own fault.’

‘Smoking isn’t illegal.’

‘No. Not yet. Worth too much in taxes. But we know the risks,’ Sarah said, and the constable nodded in agreement. In some jobs, smoking gave the sort of comfort it was impossible to get in any other way. Lots of the cops Sarah knew smoked, and plenty of the legal aid lawyers too.

Constable Lumina was in her early-twenties, Sarah guessed. Her uniform was a size too big and it fell from her shoulders like it might from a hanger, eliminating all curves. Sarah expected that in civvies Constable Lumina would look adolescent.

‘I guess you’ve seen a lot of these accident cases?’ Sarah asked.

‘Too many, unfortunately. And…’ Constable Lumina sat down next to the table with an ashtray overflowing with butts.

‘And? You were going to say something else.’

‘Not sure why I’m telling you, but something about Jo reminds me of my brother. He was sixteen when he died. A few too many mates. A few too many beers. And a stolen car. They wanted to have a good time.’

‘That’s tough. I’m sorry.’

‘It was a long time ago. I was a kid.’

Sarah didn’t ask questions. She knew the answers. Of course the family was broken; recovery was impossible. Of course people went on with their lives. Of course the grief was ever-present, sometimes seeming to recede, but returning, waves of it swelling at unexpected moments, destructive, erosive.

The two male cops finished their cigarettes and went back inside, their boots thumping down the corridor, the sound audible long after the door banged shut behind them. At the nearby railway station a train arrived, and Sarah heard, Stopping all stations to Flinders Street. The courtyard was a concrete square, surrounded by a tall fence. As well as a wrought-iron table and two chairs, there were a couple of wooden benches, and in the corner a supersized barbeque. Sarah had been here once, when she’d gone to the station’s Christmas drinks. ‘Fraternising with the enemy,’ one of her co-workers called it.

‘We take it in turns,’ her boss said. ‘Your turn this year. No point pissing off the cops.’

Sarah had gravitated to the corner with a group of community and youth workers. They discussed low funding and the lack of emergency beds, and they whispered to one another about the problems they’d encountered with particular cops, sharing strategies for handling the worst of them, naming the ones to stay away from, the ones to call. Sarah told them that when she was sixteen, she’d wanted to be a cop. It was high on her list of possible careers. ‘No way,’ one of them said. ‘Lucky escape,’ another one added. ‘So instead you became a lawyer?’

They told each other lame lawyer jokes and laughed. She didn’t tell them that her mother said, ‘With your brains, being a police officer would be such a waste. You should do law.’ Her mother had meant corporate law. She pictured Sarah — a slimmer Sarah, of course — in pencil skirts and fitted jackets, earning six figures. But Sarah believed she could make a difference, change things, bring a little justice into the world. ‘Hippy nonsense,’ her mother said. ‘We should never have sent you to that school.’

‘That school’ was an inner-city government high school. Her mother had planned to send her to a private school — Melbourne Girls Grammar, Camberwell Girls Grammar, or perhaps Methodist Ladies’ College. Schools with history and character and reputation. Sarah’s brothers went to private schools, but Sarah refused to go. There were fights and arguments, but her father supported her decision: ‘If she has a brain on her, it won’t matter what school she goes to.’ For such a successful and intelligent man, Sarah’s father was naïve. Of course, even Sarah knew she would’ve done better academically if she’d gone to a private school, but she was glad she hadn’t. At her high school, she’d had a different sort of education. Of her friends, only Jess came from a white middle-class family, and Jess’s parents were artists, living just above the poverty line. They worked part-time in cafés so they could buy art materials to make their ‘work’: large collaborative installations that involved hours of collecting from tips, hard-rubbish collections, op shops, and markets. At Jess’s house, Sarah slept on a mattress that Jess’s mother picked up from a roadside hard-rubbish collection. Sarah didn’t tell her mother, because she would’ve demanded to know if the mattress had been fumigated, but Jess’s mother never, ever used chemicals to kill living creatures. Sue, a refugee from Cambodia, lived in a small housing commission flat, with peeling paint and dripping taps, with one television for the whole family and not enough money to spend on the after-school art lessons for her talented younger sister. Ada’s family was Greek — seven people in a small three-bedroom terrace. Ada’s father worked on the docks and her mother was a cleaner. They had three children and two widowed grandmothers to look after. The grandmothers grew vegetables in the front garden, cooked big hearty meals, spoke only broken English, and argued with their grandchildren, who refused to speak to them in Greek.

When Ada’s younger brother was arrested for stealing a car, his parents panicked. They didn’t have the money for a lawyer. Sarah went to her father for advice. He gave her a brochure about legal aid. The legal aid lawyer represented Ada’s brother. He was found guilty, but they didn’t send him away; they gave him a good behaviour bond. It didn’t save Nick. He was often in trouble — drugs, stealing, assault with a weapon — and ended up going to prison anyway. But the idea of a lawyer giving free help and advice to people like Ada’s family was a revelation for Sarah; there were people working to make an unfair world fairer. She was so impressed she decided to become a legal aid lawyer.

Constable Lumina took a final drag on her cigarette. ‘Let’s go back in,’ she said.

‘Sure.’ Sarah butted out her cigarette and picked up her bag. This case was going to be tough. She’d have to keep her own feelings out of it. Focus on Jo.