Chapter 7
WRIST
For a few minutes she sat in the dark carpark. She could go back to the donga. She could go to her dad’s. She could go to the pub. Her dogs were at the donga in Tinaroo. She should feed them.
She drove east. No need to make a decision yet.
When the road split, she made the selfish choice, turning right onto the Gillies Range Road toward the farm. Nev would know what to do.
Nev always knew the right thing to do.
Time went wobbly at night in the old truck, when she couldn’t remember what year it was. She noticed she was disassociating and became emotional about it. Her splinted hand snaked inside her shirt, fingertips grazing a hard six-pack on their way up to where the broken rib had been.
Twenty-five minutes later she turned left onto Boar Pocket Road.
The horizon opened and dropped to reveal a hidden valley between Lake Tinaroo and mountains.
At night it became a series of overexposed two-dimensional images that only existed in the brief time they were illuminated by her headlights.
The road followed rolling hills dotted with white Brahman-cross cattle in one paddock, sheep in another, improved pastures and tree-lined ravines, then past the large wooden sign for Upsend Downs. She had planted those azaleas.
She was a person who planted azaleas.
She pulled into Nev’s drive without signaling, no one else in any direction—the way she liked it.
If it had been daytime she would have let herself in through the open front door without knocking.
Since it was dark, and Nev’s collies were silent, she parked under the flood light beside Nev’s silver F-250.
Never surprise a gun-owner in the country at night. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
The front step bent under her weight. She had been after Nev to fix it. Inside, Nev told the dogs to stop barking. “It’s only Ron, quit.”
Nev answered the door in a robe and slippers—she had clearly been drinking, but not too much yet—and gestured her in.
Inside, the telly in the bedroom talked. Nev had been watching a documentary.
Ronnie’s eyes prickled, then blurred. This would be one of those nights they cleaned up with a mop and never talked about again. She tried not to fall apart all at once.
Nev frowned at the splint on her wrist. “Bit of a barney, was it?”
She had prepared a funny line about eating shite at the skate park, but it stuck in her throat.
This felt like an allergic reaction, the way her body reenacted one of her old episodes.
Even people who had been to therapy for a decade could get triggered sometimes.
Nev was the only person who treated her like she was normal regardless of what shape she was in.
Nev disappeared into the kitchen. She followed. Nev opened the freezer, tossed a bag of peas on the table.
She looked at it for a minute, then reached for the bag, which was soft, and held it to her splinted wrist.
“Have you been round to your dad yet?”
I feel like I have a bag over my head, she thought.
Instinctively, she turned into Nev’s shoulder, which was lower than she wanted it to be.
Hugs from the older woman were rare, reserved for special occasions.
Nev was a good hugger, although most people would never guess that from looking at her.
One of Nev’s secret talents was taming skittish horses, which came from the time she spent overseas in conflict zones working with children.
Nev patted her back. “Shh…”
Ronnie wiped her eyes. “Don’t call anyone…”
“Shh… You’ll feel better after you talk to your dad. Let’s call Reg.”
Ronnie shook her head. This wasn’t something he could fix. She didn’t want his help. She swallowed. “Can I sleep here?”
“Yeah.” Nev flicked on the electric kettle without looking at it. “You can.”
Beyond the kitchen, the living room with its arched timber-frame ceiling reminded her of ten years ago.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t escape her mistakes.
Everywhere in this town triggered embarrassing memories.
She wondered, not for the first time, if she should move away.
Start over somewhere else where she didn’t have a reputation.
“What did that woman do this time?” Nev refused to say Maude’s name.
The answer felt childish, insignificant, hardly worth saying out loud.
She watched Nev absently worry the electric kettle’s on-off switch.
With her back against the kitchen wall, she explained the bags of corn, explained how frozen food defrosted and frozen again could form ice.
It didn’t sound so bad. That was the problem with Maude—nothing she did to Ronnie sounded as bad as it felt, which made it hard to complain.
Maude didn’t need to touch her to hurt her, she could do that with a glance.
Ronnie knew she had lost all sense of perspective when it came to her ex, which made her panicky and angry.
Was Maude an evil bitch, or did Ronnie deserve everything her ex threw at her and more?
She wanted to believe the former, but suspected the latter.
Nev listened. When Ronnie finished, Nev carried two cups of tea into Nev’s bedroom and set one on each bedside table. Why were there two bedside tables? She had never had a roommate in all the years Ronnie had known her.
“She only acts like a bitch when her mum is visiting. Her mum’s car was in the yard.” It terrified Ronnie because there was nothing she could do about it. I feel helpless.
“You think she’s using again?”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s still mad at me.” Maybe rightly so. Maybe not.
“Want to call the cops? File a report?”
Ronnie shook her head. She could never do that. Maude wouldn’t hurt Rainbow. Maude’s mother was there. They loved Rainbow. The girl wasn’t a hostage.
Rainbow wasn’t a hostage.
Ronnie sat gingerly on the edge of Nev’s bed, chest and arms tingling. Nev shrugged out of the bathrobe into a frayed jean shirt and put on a headlamp. “Ima get your dogs. You stay.”
Ronnie lay down on her side and closed her eyes.
Rainbow. Fuck.
She should steal the girl. In another life she would have become an outlaw on the run. That life was so close to this one she could taste it. In that other timeline Ronnie was toothy and useful, unafraid of Maude, the police, and being put in a windowless box.
The compulsion to protect the girl remained, a decade later, as irresistible as it had ever been. Life would be easier if the state had taken that from her as well. Sometimes she wished it had.
No one said out loud that the place had broken them.
Ronnie had done this to herself—drank the Kool-Aid, sold out, stripped away her favorite part of herself—anything to buy herself more time on the outside where she could see the sky and feel the temperature drop at night.
Selfish. The need to be comfortable, to touch grass, to be loved, to never be alone.
She hugged a pillow, covered her head, forced air in and out of her lungs. Imagined she heard the buzzing of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling that didn’t turn off.
She wasn’t tough like her friends from juvie.
She wasn’t going to any correctional institution again.
Nev returned with Matilda and Maya, who promptly ran around the house wagging their tails and play-fighting with Nev’s collies while Nev propped a baby gate across the bedroom doorway to keep them out for a while.
Ronnie had been tugging at the elastic band under her armpit with her good hand, wrestling with the sports bra that had become a straitjacket.
Nev disappeared into the kitchen, reappeared with scissors.
She chuckled as she sat down behind Ronnie on the bed.
“This brings back memories.” Nev might have been referring to a war; Ronnie didn’t ask.
Nev cut the sports bra up the middle of the back.
“Your bras are too tight. They aren’t supposed to leave red marks. ”
Ronnie eased the loopy black elastic snake over the splint on her arm, shrugged back into her T-shirt, then sprawled across the duvet. “Sports bras are supposed to be tight.”
“Depends who you ask.” Nev paused the telly. “What do you want to watch?”
“That looks fine. What is it?”
“Documentary about the man who wrote Shantaram.” Nev glanced over at her. “The book wasn’t bad.”
The made-for-television film by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation profiled the life of a bank robber born in Melbourne who escaped prison in broad daylight, fled to 1980s Bombay and set up a free health clinic in a slum before writing an international best-seller about his decade as Australia’s most wanted man.
“How much of it did he make up?” she wondered.
“How the hell would I know?” Nev said.
Ronnie smiled weakly. Her arm hurt.
Nev kept unopened toothbrushes under the bathroom sink for when Ronnie and Rainbow slept over. Ronnie brushed her teeth. In Nev’s bed, she propped up her wrist on extra pillows.
The floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall were black, but in the morning there would be a view. She loved it here.
Stone House had a soul. Conceived in the eighties as a reproduction of a stone-and-mortar country cottage in the Cotswolds, the structure had gradually morphed into something a third British, a third French and a third Australian.
The country gardens had been inspired by formal gardens Nev visited when she lived in Paris.
Nev wasn’t snobby. She didn’t drive a fast car, get her hair cut and colored at a salon, or take luxury vacations.
All of her traveling had been to conflict zones for work, most of it Agence France-Presse embedded with French armed forces, although she had briefly worked for the UN.
Now she invested in sheep, alfalfa, and potting soil for her plant nursery.
When Ronnie rolled over, the older woman raised her arm to let Ronnie rest against her. Ronnie closed her eyes with a sigh. She was still uncomfortable, but she could sleep here.