‘Understandable.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Jo said. She didn’t worry about dying anymore, although she couldn’t say that to him.
Justin was looking at her, his blue eyes fixed on her face. ‘Tell me, Ashleigh, tell me about yourself. I don’t know much about you.’
Hearing Ashleigh’s name brought her back with a jolt. ‘Telling lies is hard work,’ Mandy had said to Jo when, as a child, she told fibs and Mandy caught her out. ‘You have to have a good memory.’
‘Not much to tell.’
‘Oh, come on, Ashleigh. Give me something? This is like pulling teeth. How come you’re in Portarlington on your own and not at uni or something?’
‘Just needed to get away.’
‘A dark past.’
‘Something like that.’
Jo managed to change the conversation back to fishing and then there was a tug on her line. They caught a small snapper, but they threw it back in. ‘Will it live?’ Jo asked.
‘Yes,’ Justin said. ‘Fish don’t have as many lives as cats, but this one will have at least one more.’
Half an hour later, they caught two whiting. Justin said they should be fried lightly and served with a squeeze of lemon. ‘I’ll cook you dinner tonight,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘We can have the whiting?’ He was holding the fish up for her to assess, as if the dinner invitation were a casual thing, and her decision based only on the quality of the fish. Jo hesitated. It was tempting to go home with Justin, to watch him cook, to eat dinner with him, to go to bed with him. So tempting to think she could be that girl, become that girl. The boat swayed. Justin waited, with his broad smile and his hopeful expectation.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘So you can cook?’
With the engine back on and the boat set towards the shore, Jo stared out at the horizon, avoiding looking at Justin. Ian was her last infatuation, and he’d been all fantasy. Justin was real, and he was attractive and fun and gentle. Maybe he was ‘the one’, her soulmate. Maybe he was her only chance to find love. How easy to move towards him, to fall into an embrace, to spend the night curled up against him. To make love.
Are you for real? A soulmate?
At the sound of Ash’s voice, Jo felt the panic rising, the shortness of breath, the chill in her spine; she turned away from Justin, closed her eyes, and willed herself to breathe, to calm down. To act normal. But her body was a traitor, her heart racing, her head spinning. She gripped the side of the boat. It was impossible. It was impossible to keep spending time with Justin and keep lying.
By the time they reached the pier, her breathing was returning to normal, and she distracted herself by helping him unload the gear and the fish. ‘Thanks, Justin, I had an awesome time. I didn’t expect to enjoy fishing, but I did,’ Jo said, already moving away, but Justin stepped closer, until he was so close his breath skipped across the surface of her skin. No, she thought, but even as her mind said move away, her body gravitated closer, and they kissed.
‘I like you. It’s been a long time since I met anyone I liked as much you, Ashleigh.’
Ashleigh. Jo touched her lips with her finger. The kiss lingered, but she moved away. Justin had kissed Ashleigh. Flushed and nervous, she wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t want him to call her Ashleigh again. But she couldn’t tell him about the accident. About not being Ashleigh. What would she say: ‘My name’s not Ashleigh. My name is Jo. I killed my best friend and now I’ve stolen her name’?
‘I’m sorry, I forgot I promised to have dinner with Sue and Laurie,’ Jo lied.
‘Ring them, they’ll understand.’
‘No. Sorry, I can’t.’
She saw his smile drop. She saw the disappointment and hurt on his face.
‘Sure. Well, you better go then. I imagine Sue and Laurie don’t have a late dinner.’ He turned away, picking up the bucket with the whiting. ‘You can have the fish. Give them to Sue.’
‘Sorry, I’m running late,’ she said. ‘I have to go. Sue and Laurie, they’ll have it ready… They eat at the same time…’ She didn’t wait to hear Justin’s response. She ran the full length of the pier, past several groups fishing off the side. ‘What’s the hurry, love?’ a man called out. He was part of a small family group, whose rods hung over the rail while they sat on chairs. Next to them, a toddler slept in a stroller. As she left the pier, their laughter ran up the hill towards the town.
She ran straight to the hostel. Slipping in through the back door to avoid the receptionist, to avoid being seen by Laurie, who was often in the backyard in the evening, she sighed with relief when she reached the dorm and found it deserted. She emptied the contents of her small locker onto her bed. The clothes she had brought with her from home, she threw into her backpack. The clothes she had bought in Portarlington — shorts, singlets, and thongs, and the white shirt and black pants — she stuffed into a shopping bag to drop back off at the op shop. They were Ashleigh’s clothes, and Jo couldn’t take them home.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Ash, please don’t.
Serves you right.
She left a note for Justin. Sorry, it’s not you, it’s me, but can’t explain. When she reread it, she heard Mrs Hunt’s voice: ‘Cliché, cliché, cliché. If you write in clichés, your writing is meaningless.’ She circled their clichés with a red pen.
Jo rewrote the message: Sorry I can’t tell you the truth. I can’t stay to watch your reaction. My name isn’t Ashleigh, it’s Jo. You are a good person and I enjoyed spending time with you, but please don’t try to contact me.
She wrote another note for Laurie and Sue. Sorry, had to leave. One day I hope we will see each other again. I owe you big time.
‘You’ll have to face it some time,’ Sue had said one afternoon, while they sat together on a bench at the beach, surrounded by seagulls. It sounded like an invitation to confess. Jo considered it. Since the night of the accident, since Ash’s death, there had been no reprieve. Even when other thoughts and memories came, they were quickly swept away. Everything returned to that night. She was worried that once she started to speak, once she started to tell the sorry story, she would not be able to stop, and the outcome would be bad for everyone. It would be a deluge from which there might not be any chance of recovery.
She set the alarm for 5.00 am. She planned to leave the notes in Sue’s letterbox and catch the first bus into Geelong. She’d be gone before anyone she knew was awake.
2010
Chapter 24
It was twenty-eight degrees by the time the Geelong train pulled into Footscray. It would be in the high thirties before lunch, according to a man sitting opposite her on the Werribee train to Yarraville. ‘The last heatwave of the summer,’ he said in the authoritative tone that older men often used with young women, as if they were empty vessels with no experience of the world. She did her best to ignore him.
When Jo opened the front door, she hesitated. All her life this house had been her home, a refuge, but now it felt foreign and unwelcoming. She lingered in the hallway, reluctant.
‘Mum?’ she called out. There was no response. The house was empty. Jo made her way to the kitchen. There were dirty dishes in the sink. At one end of the table was a stack of newspapers and catalogues, and at the other end a single cork placemat, a half glass of water, and a margarine tub. On the bench sat several unopened bills. Every surface was coated with a layer of dust, and along the front of the stove, crumbs congregated. There was a trail of ants from the crumbs to the door. Jo could feel the weight of her mother’s sadness and despair, and the force of the connection that linked them together. She had ruined so many lives, including her mother’s. Jo picked up the melting margarine, pushed the lid down tight, and put it in the fridge. The house was hot and stuffy. She opened the front and back doors and the windows in the kitchen, and then went back down the hall to her room. Jo threw her bag into the corner. She crawled into bed. She could smell her mother’s scent on the pillow, on the sheets, on the doona. Or was she imagining it?