‘What is underneath the paint?’ she’d asked Grandpa Tom when she first saw the outline, the hints of green and yellow.
‘A mural painted by your mother and your uncle. I’ve painted over it half a dozen times, but it keeps coming back.’
‘What kind of mural?’
‘There were trees and monkeys, and I think a giraffe — your Uncle John was obsessed with giraffes. Your mother, she must have been about five at the time, and John, he would’ve been seven. They were right little rascals.’
‘Did it have birds in the trees?’
‘There were birds sitting in the branches, and rabbits running around the base.’
‘Did it have snakes?’ Jo had recently seen her first snake on a walk along Stony Creek. Mandy had spotted it. ‘An eastern garter snake,’ she had whispered. The snake was striped, grey and yellow, and coiled so that its head and tail were almost touching.
‘No snakes that I can remember,’ Grandpa Tom said, shaking his head.
‘Were you angry?’
‘I laughed, but your grandmother almost blew a fuse, and I was in the biggest trouble of all for laughing.’
That morning, staring at the wall, with Grandpa Tom’s voice in her head, she’d been overwhelmed with despair. Wherever he and Pop Jack were, they were ashamed of her now.
When she heard Mandy leave for work, she had dressed and packed a few clothes. She turned her phone on for the first time in weeks and put it on to charge. Almost immediately, insistent beeping announced new messages: from Laura, from Ruby at the café, from Mrs Hunt, from her father, from Ash… from Ash’s phone…
You are a murderer.
You fucking killed Ashleigh. You stupid bitch, you should be dead.
Her stomach churned. She felt her heart beating faster. Someone in Ash’s family wanted her dead. Maybe everyone wanted her dead. She read the messages again, and a third time. It was true, she was a murderer. She understood, she agreed. She should be dead. But she wasn’t. She turned the phone off, pulled it off the charge, and threw it onto the bed.
She took her bag and left the house without turning back.
At the station, the next train was headed for Geelong, due in six minutes. That was where she’d go, then. On the train she spent the whole hour staring out the window into the backyards of the houses lining the railway track as they sped through Yarraville and Newport, through the flat open fields on either side of Werribee, through Little River and Lara, until they finally reached the outskirts of Geelong. She tried not to think, but her head was swarming with the voices.
When the train arrived at the Geelong station, she was relieved to be able to move. At the bus terminal, several vehicles were waiting. She took the St Leonards bus. Portarlington was a vague childhood memory from a holiday with Grandpa Tom when she was four. They’d stayed in an old caravan and fished off the pier. They’d eaten chips on the beach, surrounded by squawking gulls; she’d been frightened at first, but he’d shown her how to chase them away. Mandy hadn’t come with them — she didn’t remember why. Probably working. She remembered the smell of his tobacco floating in through the open door of the caravan. The overly sweet hot chocolate he made her at night. Paddling barefoot along the water’s edge, her feet freezing. Sitting next to him on an old deck chair outside the caravan and counting the stars. Giggling at his silly stories.
By the time they arrived at the Portarlington shopping centre, it was raining heavily. Jo raced across the road to shelter under a row of shop awnings, but even with her back pressed flat up against the supermarket window, she was getting wet.
‘Torrential, this rain. But it’ll be great for my garden,’ announced one of several older women lined up next to her. She reminded Jo of a too-cheerful politician wanting to convince her constituents that recessions, unemployment, and increasing taxes all had a silver lining.
‘Yes, we need it,’ responded an old man, leaning on a walking stick. Beside him there was another elderly woman sitting on her electric scooter, and a couple with their shopping and a scruffy terrier. Jo couldn’t see another person under sixty.
The woman kept talking about the importance of a good soak for the garden, the amount of rain it took before moisture penetrated to the roots, and the pleasure it was to see all the trees, especially the older trees, refreshed.
‘We might need the rain,’ the woman in the scooter said with a hoarse laugh, ‘but I don’t have to be grateful when it comes, especially when it’s bucketing down.’
Sheets of rain were closing in on them. From the road, the bay was covered in a fine mist; there was no horizon, no city, no mountains. The pier had dissolved. The town was adrift.
Jo was weighed down with a desire to curl up and sleep, knees to chin, head buried in the folds of her arms. Since the accident she rarely slept, and when she did it was broken, shattered by nightmares, the nights more tiring than the days, and no relief in sight. But standing under the canopy surrounded by people her grandmother’s age, the possibility of sleep, its inevitability, was seductive.
‘Are you alright, love?’ The woman with the garden inched a little closer and placed her hand on Jo’s arm.
‘Sorry?’
‘You look pale, like you might faint.’
‘Oh no, I’m fine. I never faint,’ Jo replied.
‘My husband’s gone to get the car. Can we give you a lift somewhere?’ She had grey hair and wrinkles, but she wore jeans and heavy work boots. Her skin was tanned and weathered, and she reminded Jo of the colonial women in Australian movies, the ones who lived in isolated rural shacks and chopped their own wood. She might’ve been the same age as Mary, but was as unlike Jo’s grandmother as two women could be — no make-up, no lipstick, no earrings, no pastels.
‘No, not sure where I’m staying.’
‘Just arrived, have you? Are you looking for somewhere to stay, love?’
‘No… umm, yes.’ Jo had been driven by adrenaline all morning. By the inkling of an idea, to run, and then to run to Portarlington. But she had no plans, no sense at all as to what she might do now that she’d arrived.
‘We live next door to a hostel, it’s a backpackers’. They have a dorm and you can walk to the beach and into town. They’ll have a bed for sure. It’s early, not the tourist season yet. We can give you a lift, save you getting wet.’
‘I’m not… I haven’t decided —’
‘It’s nice here. You young travellers prefer the ocean coast, Lorne and Anglesea, but they’re much more expensive, and the natives aren’t as friendly.’ She laughed.
‘Hear, hear,’ said the man with the walking stick.
‘It’ll get busier here soon, love, and there’ll be work in the cafés and the restaurants.’
In the woman’s presence, Jo was transformed into a young, carefree traveller looking for work, and the sleepiness passed. She straightened up and met the woman’s gaze, returning her smile. ‘A job, yes,’ Jo said. ‘Any leads would be great.’
‘My son’s the manager at The George,’ said the old man. ‘It’s there.’ He used his walking stick to point down the street, but through the teeming rain, it was impossible to make out the individual buildings. ‘It’s a restaurant and a motel. One of his waitresses up and left. She fell in love with a young bloke from Canada, and now they’re gone north together.’
‘Was that Bella?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Lovely girl, but a little rash.’
‘More than a little rash,’ the man said. ‘She only knew the Canadian guy for a week and was packed and gone.’ He turned back to Jo. ‘Have you done any waitressing?’