‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘Go home, Zach.’
‘That’s what he’s told everyone, Rebecca. That’s what they told the police. Him and Nigel stayed here the night. Don’t you even know that? The whole town is talking about how you slept with both of them.’
‘No-one’s said that.’
‘You wanna go down the street – they’re saying it all right.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s why Aden’s hanging around.’
‘Nigel picked him up. He was here a little while and that’s all.’
‘Did you sleep with both of them?’
‘No!’
‘That’s what he’s let everyone think.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘He has.’
With a quick irritated movement she tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. She straightens. ‘The town would think that anyway.’
‘He’s said it because he can get away with it – if you say no you didn’t, he can say you’re denying it because you don’t want to come across like that.’
‘Go home.’
‘He’s the one saying it, not me.’
‘And you’ve never said anything like that?’
‘How long did he stay?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘It’s my business. It’s my mother he had stashed in the back seat.’
‘That’s crazy. Nigel was out in the car by himself. They were going back to the restaurant.’
‘They didn’t, though. That’s what I’m trying to tell you – they didn’t get back to the restaurant until morning. They lied. They said they were here.’
She looks at him a moment. She walks around and picks up a packet of cigarettes from the kitchen table. She collects the lighter and the ashtray and goes back around to her side of the bench. Her shoes are wet. There are dried flecks of dirt on her calves, a smear of blood on the inside of her forearm.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says, lighting her smoke. ‘I don’t know why he’d say he was here that long.’
‘It’s called a false alibi, to cover your arse.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘I want you to admit Aden’s got something to do with it. And tell him I know.’
‘Are you going to tell the police?’
‘I don’t think that’ll be how Dad will want to deal with it.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘He won’t want the police to know.’
‘Great. That’s great. Now I’ve got your father on my case. You know if Aden did help your mum it’s because she might have needed help getting away from your father.’
‘My dad has never done anything to anyone. He’s paid for Aden’s whole dole-bludging existence. Aden’s met my mum and thought, here’s a chance, I’ll fuck him over some more.’
They fall silent. Zach reaches for his glass.
Rebecca rests her cigarette on the side of the ashtray. She takes off her wet sneakers. She peels off her socks and puts them in the sink. She wipes her hands on the sides of her shorts and picks up her cigarette again. Her hands are shaking.
‘There’ll be an explanation,’ she says. ‘Aden helped because your mum needed help. All your mum has probably done is left your dad.’
From his pocket Zach takes out the docket he found in Aden’s wallet. He unfolds it and puts it down on the bench. He flattens it out and reads aloud: ‘Charlotte’s Pass Leather and Denim, $300 female bike jacket.’ He turns the docket over and reads the message on the back. He looks at her. ‘You check the date.’ He pushes the paper towards her.
She reads it from a distance; he pulls the docket away as she goes to touch it. ‘Pretty interesting, don’t you think?’
‘Where did you get that?’
‘Found it.’
‘Give it to me.’
‘No.’
‘You can’t take people’s things like that.’
‘He dropped it.’
‘He didn’t drop it.’
‘Rebecca? He’s using you, don’t you see that? He’s not even gunna let you keep the jacket.’
‘He was worried about the size.’
‘Oh … okay, then.’ Zach rolls his eyes. ‘And I guess he also told you he was up at Charlotte’s Pass?’
She butts out her cigarette. ‘I don’t know why your mum left, and I don’t know what Aden’s involvement is.’
‘He’s using you.’
‘Doesn’t that make you happy? Isn’t that always how you’ve wanted me to feel? Used?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that’s how you make me feel, and that’s how you’ve always made me feel. You want me to feel like shit, and I do feel like shit, okay, so be happy.’
‘What about me? What about how he’s screwed my whole family over? I’m not even angry with you, and I could be. You go from me one day, to my half-brother the next.’ He frowns, thinking. ‘No … the very same day!’
‘You walked out without saying anything!’
‘I’d just found out I had a half-brother!’
‘I didn’t know that! You could have told me. You got up and left – what was I meant to think?’
‘You weren’t meant to go and have sex with someone else that day!’
She puts the ashtray to one side. ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more.’
‘Tell him to leave you alone, Rebecca. Tell him I know what he’s done. Forget about him.’
She says simply, ‘I don’t want to forget about him, Zach.’
It’s there in her gaze, in her lips pressed gently together: still in love with Aden Claas, even after what Zach has told her. No way of not being in love with him.
Zach says, pushing to his feet, his voice breaking, feeling the heat in his face, the wash of rejection through his body, ‘You’re just like her. You don’t care about other people. You don’t see what’s around you. Ask him, Rebecca, ask him how long he’ll stay. My mum will come back, he’ll leave, and you’ll still be here, surrounded by your dogs in this stinking house.’
‘Go.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I want to. Why would I want to be with someone who’ll let the whole town go through them?
Moaning Joni’s
daughter, following in
her
footsteps …’
‘Get out!’
He leaves through the back door, slamming it shut and picking up his rifle and backpack. His heart is thumping; the stench of garbage fills his nostrils. He leaves the side gate unlatched, ajar enough to be missed by Rebecca but hopefully discovered by the dogs. He does it as a result of the anger and the hurt. No forward planning, an error of judgement, and so nowhere to lay blame.
21
Not an emotional girl by nature, she didn’t think. Composed at her mother’s funeral, thinking about, of all things, the
Star Wars
movies, liking that Jedi philosophy – all things happen for a reason, everything’s preordained by the Force, and even the bad things turn out to be necessary.
Her movie-based religion fails her somewhat at the moment, though, exposed as equally fanciful as that other popular tale of good and evil, the Bible.
She cries. Sits on her father’s bed and curls on her side. She cries for her mother. An inopportune time to find herself mourning, but she sobs nevertheless. She wants her mother, nobody else, not Aden – most of all not Aden.
What had felt so right feels wrong in that moment – too much, too fast: a man in her bed, watching TV on her couch, drinking and drug-taking, deep conversations, quiet moments, his lips against her temple, his arms around her, bruises on the insides of her thighs, positions recalled in her head, her cheek against the tiles in the shower. Role-playing that shames her – pretending to be asleep, sex from behind while she’s dressed in her school uniform, school socks pulled up, dress hitched up, knickers down, all because he wants it … Thrilled he’d ask her to do it, inhaling his secondhand smoke, drinking his bourbon, passing out on the couch, opening her eyes to him down between her legs, her head falling back, eyes closing, a foul taste in her mouth, moaning because he’s so knowing, and she’s so sore, and the combination of the two … making her somehow think,
This is living
.
Using the blue tarp from her father’s shed, Rebecca drags the dog’s corpse down to the roadside with a spade in her hand. The other dogs follow, and she lets them come out through the front gate. They stand around, sniff at the body. They gather like mourners at a funeral while she pulls the dead dog off the tarp and drags it into the bark and fallen branches. She scrapes up shovels of gravel from the side of the road and covers the animal. She lays some logs over the top and then some dry branches. It’s quite the pagan pyre when she’s done. Her mother would be proud.
Practical problems remain – she’s not allowed to drive, been told she’ll be charged. It’s strong in her, this urge to obey, to fit in. Not a rebel like everyone thinks. Living that, but not wanting that – wanting to be wanted.
Back up at the house she hoses down the tarp and leaves it draped over her father’s workbench to dry. She goes into the dogs’ cage and straightens their bedding. She gives each animal their own corner and spends time checking their wounds. She tops up their food and fills their water buckets, but doesn’t lock them in the enclosure. She feels their tension and can’t bring herself to bolt the door. They’re sore anyway, limping and miserable, not about to jump the fence or dig out during the night.
A phone call to Aden:
‘I don’t want to be by myself.’
He misinterprets this, laughs as though it’s sexy. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Her tone is flat.
‘Okay,’ he says. He is suddenly as serious as she is. ‘I’ll send someone out to get you.’
22
Nigel Fairbanks turns up in his ute, and, all things considered, he is light relief. Rebecca wants to be angry and suspicious of him, but, like the dogs that only bark for a minute or two, who wag their tails as he pats them, she also can’t help but smile.
He lopes around the yard, talks in his drawl, bumps her with his hip – ‘You gunna invite me in, Becs? I could leave the ute running and get the dogs barking for a bit more atmosphere.’
There are acne scars on his neck and cheeks; his lips are loose and unattractive. He is a caricature of himself, his own animated version.
‘I heard you in the background when the police rang the morning of the search,’ Rebecca says. ‘You were talking about me.’
‘Only good things, Bec, I promise.’
‘They weren’t good things. You told the police you were here all night.’
‘Not true,’ he says. ‘I didn’t say all night.’
‘How long did you say?’
‘Well, I said I couldn’t really remember how long it was. It seemed like a while to me. How long would you say?’
She doesn’t answer. She widens her eyes in challenge at his cocky grin.
The sun through the window is warm down Rebecca’s left side; it strobes through the trees, causing her to blink.
‘I saw you in that school play,’ Nigel is saying. ‘It was pretty full-on, wasn’t it? I kept expecting the preps to come on dressed as fruit, singing “Old Man River” and dancing with umbrellas – you know, the usual Kiona school production, but you were really good. You played the daughter.’
‘Was she in the car?’ Rebecca asks. ‘While you waited out front, was Mrs Kincaid in the car with you?’
‘Aden didn’t come,’ Nigel goes on as though she hasn’t spoken, ‘He reckons you have to pay him to turn up to those things, but I told him he should have gone, it was something I reckoned he would have liked. I told him you were in it. He said,
Rebecca who?
I said,
The truckie’s daughter
. But hey, he knows you now, right …’
Sunlight glints off the windscreen of a car approaching. A cloud of dust rises up behind it. Nigel makes a sudden sucking sound between his teeth.
‘Slide down in that seat a minute, would you?’ he says, ‘I’m meant to be looking after you, not putting you in it.’
The approaching car is Mr Kincaid’s. Rebecca stares at it a moment, and then gets down in the foot well.
From her new vantage point Rebecca notices the empty shotgun shells on the floor, the magazine clip stuck in the ashtray, a bloodstained towel wrapped around the gearstick. She smells how alien this man is to her: his lifestyle, the hunting smell, if that’s what it is – it’s tinny, with an oily scent under it, not engine oil, not like she’s used to, but something more complex, darker. And him – the way he moves, the way he whistles, not truly laid-back, not like Aden stretched out on her couch, feet up on her table. Nigel’s relaxed way is there to make other people feel comfortable. She looks up at Nigel as Mr Kincaid’s car passes and thinks that if he’s a hunter, there must be times he is very quiet, no humour and no joking. If you look carefully, narrow your eyes, you can almost see it – the flipside of Nigel Fairbanks: someone very serious.
‘Can I get up now?’ she asks.
He checks in the rear-view mirror. His blue eyes darken. ‘He’s turning around.’
‘What?’
‘… Yep, he’s turning around.’
Rebecca struggles to think what that means, and how on earth it might play out. Nigel pulls a perplexed expression down at her, as though they’re co-conspirators in this.
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘I think this could get ugly.’ He looks in the mirror again. ‘I don’t think he wants a friendly chat … not by the way he’s fishtailing up the road …’
Rebecca has time, hunkered down in her spot, shotgun cartridges resting against the sides of her sneakers, to see the unreal side of it. And what she hears through the open driver’s-side door only serves to add to her confusion.
Nigel, in a determined act that has her further doubting his comedy credentials, has turned off the engine and got out of the vehicle, shouting, ‘And what the fuck is your problem!’
The slam of Mr Kincaid’s car door tells Rebecca he’s more than happy to explain.
‘You!’ he bellows.
It’s straight in, from what Rebecca can gather, no summing each other up, no circling. Mr Kincaid must walk up and start throwing punches. In her mind’s eye Rebecca pits them as fairly even – Nigel may be thinner, but he’s younger, and she remembers hearing now about the Fairbanks boys being
mean as piss
when provoked, and Mr Kincaid is a farmer: he’d be strong. By the sounds of it neither one of them is any sort of slouch.
Rebecca pulls herself up onto the seat.
Mr Kincaid has parked on an angle in the middle of the road. The sun through the trees breaks up the scene; the light is dappled and striped. It’s a picturesque blend of light and shade that Joanne Kincaid would probably appreciate. The two men fight in between the vehicles. She’s never seen two sober men go at it, and what strikes her is how personal they make it – they really do try to hurt one another. They snarl and grunt and utter things in their clinches. Their bodies touch. Mr Kincaid pulls Nigel up, only to hit him again. The gravel slips under their boots and they stumble, using one another for support.