‘There are lines,’ an old boss had said once, when they discovered one of the lawyers they worked with was having a relationship with an ex-client. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to see where the lines are, other times the lines are clear but people ignore them.’
Sarah turned into Flinders Street and headed down towards the station. It was dark now, and the streets were busy. In Federation Square, there was a band playing jazz, their images projected on the large screen. A crowd had gathered, some standing, some sitting on steps and on the ground, others lounging in deckchairs. A group of children danced and laughed and chased one another in circles. Sarah crossed at Swanston Street, walked past Young and Jackson, and headed down to Elizabeth Street.
Outside Lord of the Fries, two teenage boys stood smoking and drinking. ‘Look at that fat lump,’ one boy said as she approached, loud enough for her to hear. ‘She’s bigger than your sister.’
‘Shut the fuck up about my sister, arsehole.’
Both boys laughed. In their tight jeans, their legs were twig-thin. Sarah blushed and walked faster.
‘Hey, you,’ the boy with the sister shouted. ‘You should try going on The Biggest Loser.’
‘Hey, loser,’ the other one screamed after her. ‘They’d reject you ’cause you’re so ugly.’
They laughed again. Sarah bent her head down and watched her feet persistently. They weren’t following, but their voices were like heavy hands on the base of her spine, pushing her forwards. She remembered being with Ada once, long ago, when they were in their teens. A couple of boys much like these had called her names — fatso and fat face and ugly bitch. They were on a gravel path, and Ada had picked up a handful of rocks and thrown them at the boys, yelling, dickheads, fuckwits, arseholes. The boys had run away, laughing and calling them ugly bitches. Ada chased after them. But Sarah, terrified, called her back.
To shake the boys’ voices, to shake Ada’s disapproval, to shake her own shame at her lack of courage, she quickened her pace and crossed Flinders Lane. She was almost at Bourke Street before she slowed down again. In front of a judge and a jury, acting on behalf of her clients, she was strong and articulate, but on the street, she could so easily be reduced and belittled by a couple of drunk adolescent boys. It wasn’t her body she was ashamed of, it was her inability to ignore the judgements and abuse, and to stop those judgments and that abuse interfering in her life.
To keep herself from spiralling into useless self-pity, she refocused her thoughts on Jo and Mandy. Jo was going to prison. None of them, Mandy, Mary, or Jo, were prepared for the moment when the judge handed down the sentence. None of them were prepared for being in the courtroom with Ashleigh’s family, or the fact that their very presence would put pressure on the judge to hand down the longest possible sentence. For Ashleigh’s family, no sentence would be long enough, and of course for Mandy and Mary, any sentence was too long.
Chapter 23
Portarlington was the quintessential sleepy town, even in the lead-up to Christmas and the holidays. Jo fell into an easy routine. In the morning she woke up early and went for a long walk along the Esplanade towards St Leonards. This way she avoided the other residents in the dorm. She was also worried about Laurie and Sue, whom she was finding herself gravitating towards as if they were her own grandparents. They were generous with their invitations to lunch and dinner on her days off. They invited her to go with them on their weekly shopping trip to Geelong and their occasional excursions to ocean beaches and wineries. But with the increasing intimacy, the guilt of what she was keeping from them, of the lies she was telling them, festered like a persistent sore.
Once a week she went to the police station, early in the morning when there weren’t many people around. She signed in, and they rarely asked her questions. She thought about her mother and her grandmother, whose text messages and voicemails she answered with brief replies: I’m fine, all good. Yes, I am eating — looking after myself. And she thought about prison and what her life might be like after that. Her mood varied from day to day. There were times when she could walk to the water and smile at the joggers and dog walkers, at the workman building and renovating houses on the Esplanade, go for a swim in the bay and think only about Portarlington and her present life — doing her laundry, updating the specials board at the restaurant, helping Sue with pulling some ivy off the back fence.
‘When you’re young,’ Sue had said to her one day, ‘you think about all the things you want to do. To achieve. You want to be famous. Or you want to change the world. But the years go by and the things you haven’t done don’t matter anymore. You’re happy to plant a garden and watch it grow.’
There were some days when Jo convinced herself that she could go on living, and go on living this life, a day-to-day existence, like so many of the people around her. Granted, most of them were retired, but here it seemed possible to work, to garden, to walk, to eat and sleep, to repeat the whole thing again the next day and the day after. To live without aspiring to anything in particular, without planning for the future. But there were also the mornings after sleepless nights when Ash’s voice invaded and wouldn’t stop — You can’t keep pretending to be me. You’ve stolen my name. How long are you going to keep it up? — when she thought about suicide again. When the desire not to be alive was urgent, and she stood at the end of the pier and imagined disappearing into the blue water, sinking into a peaceful, dreamless sleep. On those days, work provided relief. Often she worked both the lunch and the dinner shift, and volunteered to help clean up in the kitchen, to close up at the end of the night.
Jo and Justin worked the same shifts, so they often ate lunch together in the kitchen or on the balcony. A couple of times during her breaks, when she crossed the road and sat on the grass overlooking the bay, he came across and sat with her. They talked about Portarlington, mainly. Justin told her the bay produced most of the mussels consumed in the state, and that mussels had grown in these waters for centuries — there was lots of evidence that long before white settlement, the Wathaurong people fished here for mussels as well as other fish. Jo had seen people lined up to buy them off the boats at the end of the pier. At The George, mussels were always on the menu.
Justin told her the story of William Buckley, the escaped convict who lived around the area with the Wathaurong people for thirty-two years. He told her about the vineyards and the olive groves. He talked about his love of fishing. He told her he’d moved back to Portarlington after his mother died, to keep his father company. But she could see how connected he was to the place, to the preservation of its environment, to the acknowledgement of its Indigenous history. He was not an activist like Ian Williams: this was his home, where he belonged, and he would simply do his best to take care of it. Around him she found herself noticing the shape of the bay, the colour of the water, the species of trees.