Through a friend Mandy had worked with, Jo found a job cleaning a local office block. It was a big block and there were several cleaners. Each had their own floor, their own trolley of cleaning equipment and cleaning chemicals. Jo’s shift began at 10.00 pm. At 12.30 she had a tea break, and at 2.30 a meal break. The other cleaners called the second break ‘lunchtime’ and congregated in the third-floor kitchen, which had a television set that was on all the time. By ‘lunchtime’, the only stations going were the shopping channels — fitness equipment, home gadgets, and beauty products that eradicated wrinkles and made people young again. Sometimes Grace, who was from Ethiopia, walked down the stairs to Jo’s floor to ask her to read the label on a bottle, or the note left by Rob, the supervisor who organised all the communication with the people who owned the building. Grace was a gregarious mother of four, and she was embarrassed about her inability to read in English. The notes weren’t difficult to explain: The toilet wasn’t cleaned properly; The cleaner needs to vacuum under the desk; A woman lost her diamond earring somewhere, please look out for it. Grace always wore a headscarf and a long skirt. The building air-conditioning was turned off by the time the cleaners arrived, and Grace was usually sweating. When she stopped to talk to Jo, she wiped her forehead with the handkerchief she kept in an invisible pocket. She often asked Jo to join them for ‘lunch’. Jo smiled and said, ‘Maybe,’ but she didn’t go. Most of her co-workers were migrant and refugee women twice her age. They worked so their children could get an education. They were kind to her, but curious about why she, a young Australian girl, was working as a cleaner. ‘My children all go to university,’ Grace said, showing photos on her phone of her son in his graduation gown.
Only Rob mentioned the accident. He was a regular at the café where Jo had worked. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident,’ he said to Jo one night. ‘I guess that’s why you left the café. Though it’s not right, Ted sacking you.’
‘He didn’t sack me,’ was all she said in response. They were standing outside. It was almost three o’clock. He was smoking and she was drinking a cup of tea.
‘Well, if you need someone to talk to,’ he said, inching closer.
‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She moved away.
He shrugged his shoulders, butted out his cigarette, and went back inside.
Counting your lucky stars.
I don’t feel lucky at all.
You’re alive.
I feel dead.
You have no idea what dead feels like.
Please, Ash, leave me alone.
It’s you that can’t leave me alone.
Chapter 25
It was a long narrow hallway with a row of doors on each side. From behind a red door, about halfway down, came the thunderous rhythm of instrumental music. Jo carried a heavy box full of notebooks. She pushed the door open with her body; it opened into a garden, and the music came to a sudden stop. There was a lush overgrown lawn, rambling bushes, tall gum trees, climbing roses. A garden shed. A park bench. A table. In the middle of a green patch there was a campfire, the flames contained by a small circle of grey stones.
Jo’s shoulders and arms strained under the weight of the box, and before she reached the fire, it slipped out of her hands, landing with a thump as it hit the ground. She sat on the grass. The fire glowed and sparked. Her cheeks turned hot.
She straightened and opened the box and stared at the notebooks. Ash’s first journal, pink with a ballerina twirling on the cover, was on top. This journal predated her friendship with Ash, was filled out long before they met. Stories of another life, of a girl young enough to want to be a ballerina. By the time they met, they were more cynical — they laughed at little girls dressed in pink, at little girls with tiaras and tutus, as if they hadn’t been young themselves.
‘Not good to burn synthetic materials. They give off toxins.’ A man stood behind Jo. He wore a suit and a tie and carried a clipboard. He was standing outside of the perimeter of the light radiating from the fire, and she couldn’t see his face. ‘You’ll have to rip the pages out and then throw the cover in the bin.’
‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’
The man stepped closer, and Jo noticed that he had a long grey beard, wide and full at the top, finishing in a narrow point at his waist. The man ran his free hand down the beard, stroking it like one might pet a dog or a cat. ‘The plastic. You can’t burn the plastic.’
‘But I can’t open the journal. I don’t have the key.’
‘She trusted you with the journals, but not the key?’
‘The others, the later ones, don’t have locks.’
‘So she did trust you,’ the man said as he walked away. Jo listened to his shuffling footsteps and the crackle of the fire. A fruit bat flapped its wings as it flew back and forth between the next-door neighbour’s apple tree and a peach tree in a garden several streets away.
‘Will you burn them?’ the man called from the other end of the garden.
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you aren’t going to read them, what’s the point?’
‘Once they’re destroyed, they’re gone. I’ve got no idea what I should do. What’s the right thing to do?’
‘No right thing here.’
‘She never said what to do with them.’
‘She didn’t know she was going to die.’
‘I can’t keep them. And I can’t give them away.’
The garden was rustling and shimmering. The fire was dying out. If it died out, Jo wouldn’t be able to burn the journals. She had no idea how to start a fire. If she didn’t burn them, she’d have to carry them with her forever. ‘Would you take them?’ Jo asked the man.
He laughed. ‘What would I do with a girl’s journals? They’re full of girls’ stuff, boys and bras and complaints about her parents who won’t let her go out.’
A car alarm screeched. Jo woke.
Were the journals meaningless? Were Ash’s journals full of drivel, of teenage angst? Of frivolous things that didn’t matter?
Inside the pages was Ash’s voice. Jo knew she had no right to read them, but should she give the journals to Ash’s parents or destroy them? Would reading the journals intensify Rae and Alex’s grief, their loss? Or was it possible that reading the journals could be an antidote to their grief?
In the weeks after her return from Portarlington, Jo continued her early morning walks, usually after her shift, in the hour of semi-darkness before the sun rose, when the horizon was powdered with soft reds and oranges, and in the sky the moon was reluctant to give the night away. Avoiding the bridge and the village shopping area, she devised walks that took her to unfamiliar streets, through the reserves that skirted the river — Donald McLean, Anderson, and Stony Creek — hoping to avoid memories, to avoid Ash, hoping to find a new and unrecognisable suburb in which she might see the possibility of living. Down past the tanks, along the river, sometimes towards Williamstown, glancing across Port Phillip and imagining she could see clear across to Portarlington, the pier, and The George. Some days she allowed herself to remember Justin and the kiss even though she knew there was no point lingering on the impossible.
‘You should wear a suit, something plain and serious,’ Sarah said. She’d arrived early with some papers for Jo to sign. Her next appointment wasn’t until ten, so she’d said yes to a coffee. It had been a hot night and the house was stuffy, so they took their drinks outside, Sarah and Mandy on faded canvas deck chairs and Jo on the wooden step. In the background, the usual rumble of the traffic had been joined by screeching calls from the local magpies. The garden was dry, the leaves of some plants curled and sagged, and the stems were brittle and ready to snap. There was a distant smell of smoke from the fires around Macedon.