Rebecca says, after a moment, ‘Do you think Zach would mind if I visited him?’
‘I don’t know my son well enough at the moment,’ Mrs Kincaid says. She holds proper eye contact for the first time. ‘I have some ground to make up with Zach.’ She puts a tissue to her nose. ‘Here I go … This is your fault, Rebecca.’ She smiles warmly through her tears. ‘Thank God you’re here – you probably hate me saying it, but I can’t imagine Kiona without you. And look at you in that jacket … How good do you look in that jacket! I picked the colour. Did I tell you? I said to Aden, for God’s sake don’t make the girl go
beige
before her time. While you can, Rebecca, you should wear black. There’s a window of opportunity in which to get away with hard colours, and while you’re young you should make the most of it. Or you’ll be like me – trying to pull it off when you’re too old to do it with any sort of grace.’
‘I should take these chips up. Aden and I were gunna share them.’
‘Of course. Go, go …’ She lifts her hand and shoos Rebecca.
Rebecca pushes out her chair. She stands by the table.
‘Tell Aden,’ Mrs Kincaid says, ‘that I’m back, won’t you, and tell him it’s already driving me crazy. He will love that. You can tell him I’m bursting into tears at the drop of a hat – I’m a total mess.’
‘Are you staying?’ Rebecca asks.
Mrs Kincaid smiles tearfully. The crushed tissue is tight in her hand. ‘That will be up to Ben, won’t it … ?’
Rebecca glances over her shoulder as she leaves through the cafeteria doors. Mrs Kincaid is sitting alone at the table, smoking. Her expression is thoughtful. She seems not to notice anyone around her. She blows her smoke in a steady stream towards the ceiling.
41
A brush with death makes sex special. In his stuffy room on the veranda Aden is slow and sincere. ‘Oh yeah …’ he says, as if remembering. ‘Oh yeah,’ as if relieved. He keeps his T-shirt on, but pulls it up so they’ve got skin-to-skin contact. ‘Oh yeah …’ as if with her is the only place he wants to be. Under the scabs on his back Rebecca feels the scars already forming. He’s not like her – thin red scars that fade with time; he gets those shiny white scars some people do, the ones that never fade.
He lies on his side when it’s over and lights a cigarette. It’s Monday, her first day back at school. ‘We’re tight, aren’t we,’ he says. ‘This has made us tight. Two weeks and it feels like more.’
‘Two weeks and two days,’ she corrects him.
‘We’ve got instant history. Some people probably don’t like that, but I do. It’s not a simple case of us having been out together …’
Rebecca thinks she hasn’t heard him right and sits up to hear him more clearly.
‘You’ll always be the girl in the car, the girl I slept with when I shouldn’t have, the girl I dragged into this, the girl who saved my life. A guy once said to me if the woman you’re having sex with in your head is the same woman you’re having sex with when you open your eyes, then you’ve got yourself a keeper.’ He smiles at her. ‘That’s you. I think of other girls in comparison to you, now – a couple of cute nurses at the hospital and I’ve got this checklist going on, and I realise it’s the
Rebecca Toyer Criteria
. They don’t measure up. You’re my yardstick. No-one’s gunna come close.’ He looks around for an ashtray. Pain flickers across his face as he reaches for it. ‘Every girl and it’s gunna be … oh well, okay, that was all right, but not quite like Rebecca …’ Her school uniform is on the floor by the side of the bed; he glances at it and shivers. ‘Nothing is gunna be like you in that school uniform … Bloody hell. I’m going to have to go pretty full-on to top it. It’s hitting your straps too early. A person’s got to build to these things.’
Rebecca eases out from under the doona.
He falls silent.
When she’s done dressing she sits on the edge of the bed. She looks down at her hands. He trails his fingers over her back.
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Rebecca …’
‘You don’t want me to come with you any more.’
She turns and looks at him. He smiles kindly at her. ‘You’re the sort of person people love, Rebecca. Everyone’s gunna love you. You’re only going to get cooler, sexier, more beautiful. We’re always going to be tight.’
‘Why did you ask me to come if you didn’t want me to?’
‘I can’t hang around here any more.’
‘I can’t either.’
‘I’ll come back in a couple of years and we’ll have a filthy affair behind your boyfriend’s back. Luke Redman has his eye on you. That’ll be exciting – a copper springing us together. It’ll be the talk of the town. You can come and find me and break up any halfway decent thing I’ve got going on. A deal?’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow.’
She turns away.
‘I can’t keep putting it off.’
‘You’re not better yet.’
‘I’m only going as far as West Beach.’
‘What about Nigel?’
‘What about him? He can handle things on his own.’
She takes a breath: it’s heated dust, cold toast, cigarette smoke, sex, leather and the smell of the inside of a bike helmet. She hasn’t got a photo. It’s all going to be what’s in her head.
‘Is your mother keeping the restaurant?’
‘Yeah – yeah, she is.’
‘Did Mr Kincaid give it to her?’
‘It’s complicated.’
Rebecca doesn’t trust herself to speak any more. She licks her lips.
He says, ‘It all just happened, Rebecca. None of it was planned. Not really. No-one set out to do the sort of damage that was done. And just because in the end we all use it to our advantage, doesn’t mean we don’t care. We care. Well, I care. I care about all of what happened. I care about you. You know … sometimes we’re stuck doing these bad things, wishing we hadn’t, and wondering why if we care so much we keep on doing bad things.’
‘I could meet you somewhere in Queensland?’
‘Rebecca, think about it – if we stayed together, if we waited until you left school, worked together in the restaurant, one day got married, got a mortgage, got a job, had kids. Who wants that? Do you want that?’
‘We were going to do it differently.’
He puts his cigarette out and moves in behind her, wraps his arms around her and presses his face into her neck.
‘Don’t hate me. I’ll send you postcards.’
‘Great.’
‘I won’t forget you.’
‘You say it to all the girls.’
‘I did warn you about my track record.’
She gets up. The leather jacket is on the chair. She knows she shouldn’t but she has to ask. ‘Did you sleep with Joanne?’
‘No.’ His eye colour, though, is too light to hide the truth. ‘Just once,’ he concedes.
It’s everything not to pick up the leather jacket and throw it in his face.
‘It was a way to get to him. I wasn’t really with you at the time.’
It’s there in an instant, as quick as the images of Aden and Joanne form – a burning and heady desire to spit her regret, inflict pain on him, to see him hurt. Not save him? How fitting would it have been to let him bleed out from a stab wound in the back. Polaroid-like shots of him with Joanne build inside Rebecca’s head. Questions line up like dominoes – before he bought the jacket? After it? In the change room, while Joanne tried the jacket on? How many times? Not once, Aden doesn’t do it once. She knows him – his ‘once’ has stages, and the stages have parts, and the parts can stretch on for half the night. A weekend might count as
once
to Aden. Did he whisper his affection to
Joanne Kincaid?
She can’t imagine it. And then again … she can. It’s what he does. Different women. Different affection. Different sex. And that’s meant to make it okay. She was warned, but Rebecca’s still left astounded, cold – on so many levels.
Why didn’t Ben Kincaid stab Aden himself? In retrospect, she can’t believe the man’s control. But he was right – why give Aden the satisfaction? Even the most destructive kind of attention-seeking behaviour is best ignored.
‘I felt bad about it,’ Aden’s saying. ‘I felt like I’d cheated on you, and yet we weren’t even going out. You can ask Joanne; I felt like shit.’
Ask Joanne? Is he serious? It’s on the tip of her tongue to scream her disgust, her 100 per cent revulsion, to swear a lifetime of loathing … It’s her mother; it’s the Joni Toyer pull, the rip, the undercurrent in her personality – what would be so easy to go with, the dark water ready to sweep her away. But she fights it.
She picks up the jacket and lays it on the bed.
‘I’ve been careful with it. You can return it.’
‘Rebecca …’
She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t say goodbye.
She picks up her schoolbag and closes the door gently behind her.
It’s hard to go like that – without a scene – but something tells her, one day she’ll be pleased she did.
She waits until she’s well down the road and finds a secluded spot by the river, where she sits, hugs her knees, and watches the water pass. It’s the colour of well-brewed tea. It slips deep and sure and steady, as though its course is charted. And the longer she sits, the more she sees there’s sovereignty, real potency in the way the water flows. There’s nothing soothing about this current – it moves without pause, without rhyme or reason; the water coming through catches up as fast as the river rushes forward. In this way it is the right place for her to come and reflect – not for the beauty, or the ability the river has to stroke all five senses. It’s the slippery, darker sixth sense the passing flow invokes, the unsettling reality that water going holds in it the same elements as water coming.
42
For dinner Rebecca and her father have warm chicken salad. It’s a still night. Moths flutter around the light. ‘It was me who called Teddy,’ her father is saying, ‘and told him you might be upset about the dogs, and that Ben Kincaid was there. None of it seemed right. Teddy told me things had got out of hand.’
‘I don’t remember Mum talking about Ben Kincaid much.’ Rebecca says.
‘No, she didn’t say much.’
‘Did he come to her funeral?’
‘Yeah, he did.’
‘Did he ever own a red sports car?’ she asks, smiling.
Her father laughs quietly. ‘Does he look like a red sports car type to you? I think your mother made that story up. I never knew any sports-car-driving actor in her past. She knew a lot of beat-up Ford and Holden drivers, but no-one with a red Ferrari.’
‘Mum was pregnant with me when you met her, wasn’t she?’
‘If you’re talking the first time we ever met – she wasn’t pregnant then. She was pregnant when we got together, two years later.’
‘Did she know the Kincaids?’
‘Everyone knew the Kincaids. But they weren’t among it. They didn’t mix with the general riff-raff. Your mum hung out at Newman’s Garage. That’s where I first saw her.’
Rebecca lowers her knife and fork.
‘She could never remember it,’ he says. ‘But I remember it all right. She was an up-front, sassy thing, teasing me about how I had to get around in a truck. She asked me how I went to the drive-in and what happened when I went to the beach. I told I didn’t go to the drive-in or the beach much. She said she’d love to go to those places in the truck, and go parking in it. I was pretty much a goner from that point on. I kept going back. I spent a fortune on tune-ups I didn’t need and spare parts I’ve probably still got out in the shed. And you’d remember we did take that rig to the beach, and to the drive-in, until they put those new gates in.’ His eyes are bright with reminiscing. ‘It was a good day the day she climbed up in that cab. I’ll never forget the smile she gave me – she really thought it was a thrill, being higher than everybody else. She grinned down at every car we pulled up beside.’
Rebecca says, ‘I didn’t know that story.’
‘No … I actually liked that she never talked about it – they’re my memories that way. You know what she was like– if she’d remembered it she would have retold things over and over and changed it, and made the story more exciting. This way it’s … quiet, the way it was. She worked in the garage office. And that first day I drove in, the way she stood and looked up at the cab … like she’d never seen a truck pull into a garage before. It was one of the few times I saw her looking like a kid. I could see she was a kid, inside it all.’ He smiles at a private thought. ‘She always was a poor choice of office girl. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did. Sue Newman was trying to give her a bit of a leg-up, I think.’
‘Was there a Mr Newman?’
‘Sue Newman was widowed a long time ago. She’s always run that business. She’s got no proper qualifications, but some sound mechanical knowledge. She’ll say if a job is too big for her. Joe, her son – he’s a good mechanic too.’
‘Mum was my age at the time?’
‘Just turned seventeen. Her first proper job. She was only there to answer the phone. Joe would get home from school and take over. He was more responsible at his age than Joni was ever gunna be, even as an adult.’ He smiles and shrugs his shoulders. ‘God knows what Joni did to them – Sue Newman wouldn’t talk to her after Joni quit. Even right up to the time before she died they wouldn’t talk – your mum wouldn’t go into the garage and Sue wouldn’t ring here. Two stubborn women there …’ He looks off to the other side of the kitchen. He brings his gaze back. ‘I suppose you could even ask Sue who your father might be? Or I could ask for you. She wouldn’t mind. Even Joe might remember. I suppose he was about fifteen or sixteen at the time. He might know who she was knocking around with.’
Rebecca shakes her head.
‘I’ve even thought of having them as your safety number when I’m away. Teddy tends to be too busy now. Joe Newman often asks about you. They would be good people to call.’
‘They want me to babysit their girls.’
‘Well, there you go,’ he says. He takes a mouthful of his dinner. ‘They can be your new safety number.’ Once he’s finished chewing he says, ‘Maybe it was for your own good your mum didn’t tell you who your real dad was. Not Kincaid anyway, that’s for sure. Any chance of a bit of that money coming your way, and she would have been yelling it from the rooftops. Given the time we’re talking, your real dad was more likely some hothead cruising through town, one that perhaps didn’t treat her right.’