The Fancies, page 25
‘Do you have to be such a bitch?’
‘No. It’s a choice.’
A murmur went through the crowd. Someone sniggered.
‘Come on, Grandpa,’ she said. ‘It’s cold.’
‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m having a nice chat here with …’ He frowned at Jessica. ‘What did you say your name was again?’
‘Jessica. Ed Bram’s granddaughter.’
‘Oh,’ said Old Dick, visibly disappointed. ‘One of them.’
‘That’s right,’ Jessica said in a rush. ‘I am one of them, and proud of it. My mum and I are all that’s left. We’ve had to do it tough in this town on our own.’
‘Congratulations on your achievements,’ Abigail said to Jessica. She took her grandfather’s arm again, but he remained unmovable. It also seemed that Jessica wasn’t done.
‘How do you think it feels,’ Jessica said, raising her voice, ‘living here every day with the people who murdered my grandfather?’
Abigail felt a mounting dismay. Alarm and bewilderment crossed her grandfather’s face.
‘Murdered?’ he said. ‘Girl, what are you talking about—’
‘Enough,’ Abigail said to Jessica.
‘No.’
The crowd stilled. An eerie silence dropped over the foreshore. Even the waves went quiet, as if the ocean itself held its breath.
Jessica marched forward and addressed the crowd. ‘Doesn’t anyone think it’s convenient that she came back on the same day the bone was found?’ She appeared to wait, but when no response came she went on. ‘We all know the Fancys are covering something. That bone is obviously evidence, and she’s back for damage control—’
‘What?’ Abigail broke in, stunned.
‘She also bought a burner phone and deposited a mountain of cash, and bought dark clothes, rope and duct tape—’
‘A hundred bucks is not a mountain,’ Abigail said, uncertain why she was defending herself or for what. ‘And it was Teflon tape. And really?’
‘—to cover up her crimes. She’s been to prison a dozen times—’
‘Twice.’
‘—and frankly she deserves to be in there forever, for what she did to that baby.’
And there it is. Time crunched to a standstill. Twenty-four years vanished, and it was 1999 and she was standing on this lawn, crushed beneath this mass of leering faces and she did not matter. There was nothing she could say or do because their own primal wounds were in control and their minds were made up.
The rock had been heavier than she’d anticipated. Where had it come from? Jessica yelled it—slut—and then the rock was in her hands and it was pelting through the frigid night air to hit Jessica just where her blonde hair met her forehead: thwack. The sound would never leave her, like other things would never leave her: stench of seaweed; metal stink of blood; reek of a public toilet block. Jessica had folded as though she was boneless and Abigail didn’t hear her body hit the ground because she could still hear the dull smack of the rock on skin, she could still hear the ring of slut and the roar-whine in her ears. There’d been nervous laughter from the crowd then, as there was now, and she had spun on her heels, felt herself screaming, but could anyone hear it?
Why wouldn’t anyone help her?
Her limbs turned to ice. It’s happening again. It’s happening again, it’s happening again, it’s happening again. Abigail was a statue—she made herself a statue. Because she could not go back and if she were to throttle Jessica Bram’s skinny white neck, if she were to paint a crown of bruises about Jessica Bram’s fluffy blonde head, she would go back undoubtedly.
‘Lock them all up,’ Jessica was saying. ‘They killed my grandfather.’
Abigail could hear the sound of someone panting. Was it herself?
It felt like an eternity that she had stared down at Jessica’s lifeless form. Later someone told her it had been only seconds, but at the time she’d watched Jessica slumped on the grass and thought, truly, that she had killed her. But Jessica got to her feet—someone put their arm around Jessica, Abigail remembered being surprised by that display of humanity—and Jessica wiped her face, dusted off her jeans and resumed as though nothing had happened, blood trailing down her face. Admit it, Jessica said. You’re a slut just like your grandmother. Many years later, when Abigail recounted those words to Jen, Jen had daintily exhaled a stream of smoke and offered, ‘Not every day you hear the words “slut” and “grandmother” in the same sentence. But mmkay.’ To which Abigail replied, ‘Especially when my grandmother crocheted doilies and thought risqué was a woman in trousers.’
But there it was, laid out for all to see—the man behind the curtain of Jessica’s outrage: the legend of a woman. A woman running; a woman stolen like property; a woman making a choice, the sin of sexual agency. Did it matter what was true when your identity, your very genetic heritage, was rooted in it, born from the slight of it?
Now a murmur went through the crowd. Bodies jostled, the crowd parted, and Abigail saw her mother emerge, trailed by her posse of men. Col Morton appeared, soaked from head to toe and with what looked like the beginnings of two black eyes. Adrian Turner, his little brother and Twitch were wet from the waist down; a piece of seaweed clung to Twitch’s leg. As Abigail stared, uncomprehending, Col moved his hands and cupped them in front of his genitals.
‘Richard,’ her mother cried, hurrying to Old Dick’s side. ‘Are you okay? Where is your chair? Adrian, get it, would you?’
Abigail watched as Adrian Turner retrieved her grandfather’s wheelchair but the old man refused to sit, batting Adrian’s hands away.
‘What’s going on?’ Nell demanded.
No one answered.
‘Abigail?’
‘Well,’ she began, slowly, ‘apparently I’m a crime lord.’
She saw her mother’s eyes widen, roving over her face. Then Nell glanced at the crowd and Abigail wondered what it was she could see in her mother’s expression. It wasn’t fear, Nell Fancy was far too on top of things in this town to feel afraid of it, but was it something like it? Trepidation?
No. It was disgust.
‘Pathetic,’ Nell said. ‘Don’t you all have better things to do?’
And Abigail wanted to laugh now because, as if on cue, heads dropped to consider their own feet. Throats cleared; bodies shrunk. No one could inspire the scolded inner child quite like Nell Fancy, but this was the first time Abigail had felt grateful for it. Only Twitch lifted his chin, crossing his arms and digging his knuckles beneath his biceps, bringing the muscles out like melons in his sleeves.
A voice came from the crowd: ‘Jess?’
Abigail blinked. Penny Bram was stretching a hand towards Jessica.
‘Let’s go home,’ Penny said.
‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘Let’s sort this out, once and for all.’
‘There’s nothing to sort out,’ Penny said, and Abigail could hear the nervous plea in her voice.
Another murmur started up in the crowd, more shuffling and jostling, and now the postmistress appeared. Abigail saw Mrs Dinwiddle hesitate before opening her mouth and announcing, ‘Jessica, maybe you should listen to your mother.’
Suddenly Old Dick spoke again. ‘Listening to a mother is good advice,’ he said. ‘I didn’t listen to Luce—get your hands off me, boy,’ he said, as Adrian tried once again to usher him into his chair, ‘—and I should have. She’s a mother. She knew when that girl was in trouble—I said get off—and I didn’t listen.’
‘You knew Honnie Zabowski was pregnant?’ Jessica said.
Abigail turned to Jessica so fast her ears rang. ‘You knew it was Honnie?’
And when Jessica looked at her, she couldn’t make out whether Jessica’s expression was one of incredible guilt or incredible triumph.
Honnie had been Abigail’s friend for only eighteen months, yet Abigail thought of her every night. When she closed her eyes Honnie was there, materialising behind her eyelids, no matter how often, how resolutely, or however chemically she tried to push the image away. While Abigail herself lived and aged, Honnie remained a portrait suspended in Abigail’s mind, always fifteen, a fixture in her internal landscape.
Honnie had come to town as a teenager with her mother. A distant cousin of the Lofts, they slid in without a ruckus and, not two years later, slid back out again in spite of one. Hardly anyone saw them go.
Everyone was too busy pointing at Abigail.
One of those kids at school so skilled at blending in no one’s exactly sure how, one day Abigail discovered Honnie was in her orbit and liked her too much to wonder when she came to be there. Honnie was to Abigail what everyone else wasn’t. She wasn’t simpering. She wasn’t pandering. She wasn’t sulky, needy, phony. Honnie was thoughtful and funny, wickedly deadpan; she could make Abigail laugh to the point of breathlessness just by an offhand gesture, a tone of voice, a quirk of facial expression. More than once Abigail got sent out of chemistry for being disruptive when she was cry-laughing over Honnie’s imitation of Mr Hall’s lazy eye. Honnie kept red frogs in her pocket and when she shared them with Abigail they were gooey from the warmth of her body. In return Abigail gave her smokes and sanction. Honnie wore her thick hair in a sleek ponytail; she wore round glasses and huge jumpers over her big, soft frame. To Abigail, Honnie was a person-sized cushion: comfort and warmth and nothing not to like. She didn’t know at the time that Honnie was so good at being likeable because she had striven to make herself that way, had made herself malleable, had erased herself so meticulously, shaved away any sharp or protruding edges in order to survive.
Abigail wished she had known.
She never stopped thinking about her.
No matter how much she ran.
Pure silence. As if Abigail’s surroundings had evaporated and she stood in a vacuum. Then a whisper, a low hiss in the crowd that boiled swiftly to a hubbub, then a clamour. Questions hurled, shouts and insults began to fly.
Abigail’s head was reeling. A kind of bewildered fury was coursing through her and she couldn’t fully comprehend what was taking place. Was Jessica Bram really standing here on the foreshore in the cold night air, yelling at the entire town? Was Abigail really listening to this implausible melodrama? Again?
The urge to lie down, to close her eyes, to be tucked away in her cosy apartment in the anonymous drone of the city buckled her knees. That was the moment Abigail realised three things.
Firstly, she was tired of running and simply would not anymore. So be it. She would stop and face it, the tidal wave of emotion, and she would deal with whatever that meant, whatever that came with. She was not sixteen anymore. She was a grown-arse woman with a rich life and a biting conscience and a giant, flawed heart.
Secondly, she realised that just like this senseless crowd, just like herself blasting up the freeway in a stolen Maserati, Jessica Bram was acting out her own pain. She was doing whatever she could to gain relief. And while Abigail couldn’t exactly love her—hell, she didn’t even like her—in this place, this acting from a wound, she could understand her. Both of their childhoods had been spent cementing the stories about themselves, true or not, that were told to them by others. There was no difference between Abigail trying to prove who she wasn’t—not just a Fancy, not just the daughter of a small town big gun, and Jessica trying to prove who she was—not just a Bram, not just the only child of a single mother. They were both searching for the exact same thing: freedom. The liberty to be whoever they really are.
That discovery caused everything she had thought about the past two-and-a-half decades to grind to a halt then shunt into reverse.
And thirdly, she realised Nate Ruskin was standing beside her, murmuring into her ear. Her mother’s horse was in labour.
THEM
Trisha slid the tinnie against the jetty and Young Dick climbed out.
‘Listen,’ he began to say, ‘about the insurance—’
Trisha raised a hand to cut him off. She held his eyes and nodded once, then the engine revved and Trisha cut a tight circle and motored away. Young Dick didn’t know where she would go, but he knew wherever it was would be as far from the crowd as possible. He could see them clustered on the street in front of the drive-in. A seething, yeasty mass.
Standing at the end of the jetty, Young Dick took a moment to collect himself. He was furious. They had not listened to him. Less than an hour ago he had told them to go home and now look—there they all were, sucked to a whiff of ado like mosquitoes to a bared ankle.
Young Dick was struck by the thought that if he hadn’t spent the past six years wishing deep down that no one felt the need to seek and heed his every instruction, they probably would have heeded him tonight. Since his mother died and his father’s disease began to take hold, Young Dick had resentfully, unconsciously, rejected the responsibility he’d inherited from his father, his grandfathers. Young Dick didn’t want to be a leader; he simply wanted to live his life, quiet with his family. Sure, he guarded some unfortunate truths he’d have to take to his grave, but regardless, for six years he had tried to wean the town from the Fancy reign and tonight it appeared they’d finally chosen to let go of the damn nipple. They had decided to ignore him and think for themselves.
And now he wished they hadn’t.
Young Dick hurried along the jetty. Murmurs of consternation came from the crowd, punctuated by sharp jabs of a female voice raised in anger. He tried to place the voice. It wasn’t his wife, and it didn’t sound like his daughter.
Then Young Dick heard his father say, ‘She knew when that girl was in trouble—and I didn’t listen.’
And he thought, Oh, shit.
Adrian Turner was trying in vain to get Old Dick Fancy back into his chair. The old man’s spine was bending and his knees were trembling, but he refused to sit. Every time Adrian offered his hands he was swatted away and Adrian was beginning to feel like an annoying insect. Plus his popped-open thumb was hurting. Old Dick had smacked it a few times and Adrian was reluctant to keep putting it in the line of fire.
The problem was, Adrian held so much respect for this retired patriarch, this hard-weathered, law-making, justice-dealing old cray fisherman, that his clumsiness felt like trying to put undies on the King. It just seemed wrong.
It also did not help that Abigail was watching his every move, his every fumble, and he felt as though he was failing a test he didn’t know he was taking but that he lusted desperately to pass.
Let him speak, Adrian wanted to say. But at the same time he thought, Dear god, someone make him stop. Because now Jessica Bram was gaping at Old Dick Fancy incredulously. At the precise moment that Adrian copped a particularly forceful smack on his injured thumb he heard Jessica say, ‘Honnie Zabowski is pregnant?’ and, momentarily deranged by the flare of pain, Adrian blurted, ‘She can’t be. She’s dead.’
When Mrs Dinwiddle heard Jessica speak the girl’s name, tears came into her eyes. For the unwitting swoop of emotion the postmistress might have wanted to blame menopause but she was long past that; she was long past the point of even being able to blame that—not that she had ever actively mentioned it to anybody. In fact, all those years ago, when she had been weathering the change of life, Beverly Dinwiddle had told nobody, not even her dear husband Larry, and so, when she decided to come forward with the other women and have herself eliminated, no one had batted an eyelid. True, she’d received a few funny looks, heard a snigger or two, but the postmistress had done her duty for the town. At the time she’d been convinced, like everyone else, that it was the right thing to do.
Mrs Dinwiddle heard the girl’s name now and thought bitterly, I shouldn’t have done it. She wanted to correct Jessica Bram. It wasn’t a ‘mountain’ of cash that Abigail had deposited, merely two fifty-dollar notes. But that would be infringing upon Abigail Fancy’s privacy.
And the postmistress had already, once before in her life, infringed upon Abigail Fancy’s privacy.
Shame coiled tightly inside Mrs Dinwiddle. It is said that one’s past mistakes come back to haunt one and, heck, the postmistress was feeling haunted indeed.
Twenty-four years ago, Beverly Dinwiddle had wanted to correct the town—this isn’t the crime you think it is—but in order to do so, she would have been admitting to a crime. A violation. A month after the baby was found, the letter had come in, addressed to Miss Abigail Fancy in a teenage girl’s handwriting (who else dots a lowercase ‘i’ with a loveheart?). The postmistress took the letter to the kitchen and held it over the boiling kettle. Then she opened the letter and read it. She’d watched herself as if she were witnessing someone else, a character in a spy novel perhaps, undertake this grievously immoral, not to mention thumpingly illegal, act of treachery. Tampering! Opening a mail receptacle that was not hers! For this act the postmistress knew she could be criminally liable. She could go to prison.
Just like Abigail did.
So Beverly Dinwiddle knew the truth, but she could never say how she knew. Over the years she had swung between trying to pepper the town with hints, to steer the narrative in the right direction, and wanting to stay silent, to put the whole awful mess to bed. When people eventually stopped talking about it, the postmistress had consoled herself that it was over, and resolved that one should begin each day with chin up and eye to the future.
Now she was riven with shame.
The postmistress knew the letter by heart. Dear Abigail, it began, in Honnie’s loopy girlish script (dear god, she was but a baby herself!) Perth is nice. I don’t know anyone. Thank you for being there for me. I’m still sorry about your jeans. If you write to me I’ll try and write back, but Mum says I shouldn’t talk to anyone in Kingo ever again because of what happened with the baby. Sorry they think it’s yours. Love, Honnie.
Mrs Dinwiddle stepped forward. ‘There’s nothing to cover up,’ she said. ‘Ms Fancy here—’ she gestured to Abigail, hoping it was a strong, forceful display of solidarity ‘—had nothing to do with baby Joan.’
And that’s when David Wimple, owner of the hardware-cum-surf store, spoke up from the crowd: ‘And she never bought rope, either.’
