Usually she was a chatty mother, talking to Jo even when Jo was being surly and dismissive, but now she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her daughter. All those hours in the police interview, she was ashamed. She was useless to Jo. To comfort or reassure Jo was impossible and wrong. It was wrong, wasn’t it?
‘Mandy, that’s not true. I’m here to help, and David too. Poor David, it was a big shock for him.’
Poor David, Mandy thought. Poor fucking David, living in another state with his clever wife and his two sons, not even offering to come and see Jo, not offering anything. Relaxing back on his couch in Adelaide, he could pretend it was happening to someone else’s daughter. He didn’t have to worry about dealing with this shit. ‘I know you want to help, Mary, I know.’
Outside in the backyard, the strong wind had transformed the ancient Hills hoist into a spinning wheel. It creaked, whirling erratically, like the wheels at local fundraisers run by stocky, middle-aged Rotary men.
‘It’s about luck — it was bad luck. Every night young people like Jo and Ashleigh are careless and stupid, and most of them get away with it. But Jo and Ashleigh didn’t get away with it. They should’ve known better. Should’ve…’ Mandy began to cry. ‘I can’t stop crying, even though I know it’s useless. My life — as if it’d been a piece of cake up to now — is a mess. I’d hoped for another kind of life for Jo.’
‘It’ll get better,’ Mary said. ‘People’ll forget. Life’ll go back to normal.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mary,’ Mandy yelled.
‘Mandy, please. I didn’t mean —’
‘Ashleigh is dead. She was eighteen years old. A child. Jo loved her. I loved her… Her parents have lost a daughter and Jo is responsible.’ Mandy shook her head. ‘It’s never going to be normal again, for any of us. I can’t see any possible recovery from this.’ She sat back in the chair and put her head down on the table. Would there ever be a normal again? Her daughter was alive, but less than five minutes away Rae was making preparations to bury Ashleigh. Life wouldn’t go back to normal, not for her and certainly not for Jo.
Mandy was exhausted, spent. How could she go to work after this? How could she walk through Yarraville to Coles and stand behind the deli counter while the locals, people she’d known for years, came in and bought their olives, their bacon and cheese, and chatted about the weather, school, the council, the new development, while she measured and sliced? But she needed to work. They had no savings. They lived week to week, and if she didn’t work they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills. She’d have to ask for a transfer, to another supermarket in another suburb, somewhere where she’d be anonymous, where she wouldn’t be a constant reminder to Ashleigh’s family and friends that she was Jo’s mother, and that Jo was responsible for Ashleigh’s death.
‘Mandy. Mandy.’ Mary was calling her gently. ‘Are you —’
‘Am I what?’
‘I thought you were off somewhere.’
‘I wish.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘What can we do? We are going to sit and wait. Wait until the police and the lawyers do whatever it is that they do. Like you said, limbo.’
‘They won’t send her to prison. Not for an accident.’
‘She’ll go to prison, Mary.’
‘We can’t let that happen.’ It was a plea.
‘There’s nothing we can do to stop it.’
Mary could be hurtful and thoughtless. She blamed Mandy for getting pregnant young; she blamed Mandy when David moved to Adelaide. But Mary and Jack had supported Mandy with Jo. They babysat and lent her money, and in return all they asked was to be included in Jo’s life. And so Mandy included them. It had been more difficult since Jack died, but Mary loved Jo and Jo loved her grandmother. Mandy hoped that their love would survive and be strong enough to help them deal with the grief and the guilt, with the bloody nightmare they were trapped in.
Chapter 13
Sarah weighed her piece of chicken and put on the steamer. What she craved was a vindaloo curry, saffron rice, a garlic naan, and lots of hot mango pickle from the Curry Vault in Bank Place. And a glass or two of merlot, on the balcony.
The pale chicken breast was bland. She sprinkled sea salt and ground pepper on it, along with a squeeze of lemon, and served it on a plate with broccoli, mushrooms, and carrots. Protein and three vegetables, Weight Watchers–style. No potatoes. Potatoes aren’t a vegetable. Fidelity to this diet would be rewarded. If she shed a kilo a week, over the next three months she would’ve shed twelve kilos, which wasn’t enough but would inch her closer to her goal weight. If she lost the weight, she could wear the clothes she bought last time she went on a diet, which were now shoved to the back of her wardrobe: expensive bootleg jeans that even then required lying down on the bed and sucking in stomach muscles to get the zipper up; a silk designer dress from a boutique in Toorak Road that the shop assistant said was ‘so fashion forward’ but that she’d only worn once. If she lost the weight she’d be normal, and her mother might finally see beyond her body. If she lost the weight, she could sit comfortably on the train, on aeroplanes — if she ever managed to save enough to go travelling again.
She spread the contents of the Joanne Neilson file on the table. She was meant to give eating her full attention. No reading at the dinner table. Mindful eating, they called it in the diet books. This mindful eating somehow, magically, translated into weight loss. But if she concentrated on eating her tasteless dinner, she’d get depressed. When she was depressed she ate more, and thought more about weight and being fat — it was such a waste of time. If she added up all the minutes and hours and days over her thirty-four years that she’d spent worrying about her weight, it’d add up to half her life. This is how they kept women in their place: imagine what women could achieve, what she might’ve achieved, if she didn’t spend so much time hating and obsessing over her body and trying to transform it to match some unrealistic ideal.
She read through Jo’s statement. Jo was driving. She was drunk. It was Jo’s attitude that concerned Sarah. During the interview, Jo was too controlled. There was no visible sign of remorse or contrition. She didn’t cry, not even when the questions focused on her relationship with the dead girl, Ashleigh. This worried Sarah, because people were always judging women and making judgements about them.
The evidence from the other two girls — Mani and Laura — was damning. They’d made an effort to be fair: ‘She’s a good driver,’ Mani had said. ‘I felt safe with her. Maybe there was something on the road, oil or something.’ But in the end, their answers to the police questions said it alclass="underline" Was she drunk? Yes. Was she driving too fast? Yes. Was she arguing with Ashleigh? Yes. Did anyone tell her to slow down? Yes. Did she slow down? No.
Sarah mapped the preparation needed for the case: identifying people to interview and those willing to give references and testimonials. Her aim was to uncover Jo’s story. If there were some extenuating circumstances, something in Jo’s background — poverty, abuse, or illness — that would explain, if not justify, her drinking, Sarah would track it down. She hoped that there was a long line of respectable people who were prepared to speak on Jo’s behalf. To say she was polite and friendly, that she helped little old ladies cross the street, that she had a bright future.
It was the storytelling part of the law that fascinated Sarah. The challenge of finding a way of turning the ‘accused’ into a person, someone real and vulnerable; someone that the judge (and jury, if there was a jury) would warm to and empathise with. There was a way of presenting the evidence, the arguments, that gave the court a sense of the person beyond the crime, before the crime. Storytelling was what made the difference between a good barrister and a mediocre one. The prosecution would produce victim impact statements from the dead girl’s parents and her sister, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles and friends. These would be sad accounts. Narratives that would fill the courtroom with grief and with anger, that would make no sentence seem long enough.