Page 24 of Queenslander
“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 theback. “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 wroteShantaram.” 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.
