Page 47 of Darling Girls

‘Why don’t we talk about it on the road,’ Jessica said. ‘It’s getting late, and we have a long drive ahead. No doggy treats for these guys before we –’

‘Actually,’ Norah said, ‘Hando said we’d pick it up again tomorrow, when we were fresh. I guess that means we’re staying the night. Maybe even two.’

Jessica felt her eyebrows rise. ‘DidHandosay he’d run my business? I don’t have a nine-to-five job – most of our jobs are scheduled on the weekends. And is he going to take care of my husband too?’

‘It’s just one night,’ Alicia said, yawning and stretching her arms above her head. ‘Sonja can manage and Phil will be cool. I’m knackered, Jess.’

‘And I don’t think the dogs will tolerate another car trip today,’ Norah added.

The affection she’d felt for Couch just a short while ago vanished, and Jessica was struck by the panicky feeling that always overcame her when a situation got out of her control.

‘But where will we stay?’ she said weakly. ‘Who will have us with these dogs?’

‘They’re service dogs,’ Norah replied seriously. ‘Legally, they can stay anywhere.’

Jessica began scrabbling in her bag for her pills. She hated those fucking dogs. Hated the police. Hated Wild Meadows.

‘I’ll have to check my messages,’ she said. ‘Make sure there’s nothing urgent.’

As she pulled out her phone, she prayed for an organisational emergency that would require her to return to Melbourne that night. She longed to be back in her own home, making dinner before getting into her own bed. She didn’t do well out of her routine. She hadn’t planned for an overnight stay and hadn’t brought the things she needed. The tears that stung her eyes might have been as much to do with that as having to talk about her childhood.

She unlocked her phone and held it to her ear as the voice messages played.

‘Jessica, it’s Tina Valand here. I just spoke to Debbie.’

This was not the sort of organisational emergency Jessica had in mind.

‘This is a bit awkward, but Debbie told me there was an issue regarding some medication that went missing from her bathroom cabinet? I feel awful bringing this up, but it has me worried because, well, I noticed that some pills had gone missing from my place too. I’m a big fan of yours, you know that, and I’ve recommended you to plenty of people – I just hope it won’t come back to bite me.’

Fuck. This wasn’t going away. She needed legal and PR advice. Heck, she might even need rehab advice! Mostly she needed advice on how to make all this exciting on a Saturday while in the middle of a police investigation in Port Agatha.

There were two more messages waiting for her, both from clients. She decided not to listen. Instead, she dropped her phone into her bag and said to her sisters, ‘I guess we’d better find somewhere to stay for the night.’

THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST

The next time I see Dr Warren, he is wearing a blue tie and he only makes me wait for one minute before he looks up from his notes.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘You were talking about your mother and the parish accountant.’ He looks at his notes. ‘John.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘So . . . as I feared, my mother soon started spending time with John outside of church. At first, it was ostensibly “business” – meeting up to look over accounts or to organise the sale of half our land, which was how John suggested we claw our way back to solvency. But before long the meetings became social; they saw each other for coffee, for lunch and eventually for dinner.

‘It took time to adjust to my mother leaving the house again after months of seclusion. When she wasn’t with John, she was with the church ladies, sorting second-hand clothes for the jumble sale or knitting tiny beanies for premature babies. Sometimes she even visited people in need, the way the women had done to her, offering them support and a pathway to God. I was never invited, which was fine by me. I did still have to go to church on Sundays, unfortunately, but other than that I stayed well clear of my mother’s new, churchy lifestyle.’

‘Why?’ Dr Warren asks. ‘Were you jealous?’

Dr Warren has a slightly deviant look in his eye. As if he likes the idea. So mother issues are his perversion? Who am I to judge?

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Jealous and desperate for attention. When I didn’t get it, I had to look for attention elsewhere. So I made friends with the kids at school who scared me: the ones who drank alcohol and went to parties and pierced their own ears at lunchtime with a needle and an ice cube. I stopped handing in my homework so I could hang out with these kids in detention after school rather than going home to a house full of churchy women who tutted every time they saw me – or, worse, going home to my mother and John, who was starting to spend more and more time there.

‘“Are you and John dating or something?” I remember asking my mother, when he’d visited for the third time in a week. I’d never witnessed them being openly affectionate but I wasn’t naive.

‘“If I were,” my mother said, “how would you feel about it?”

‘“I wouldn’t like it,” I told her.

‘My mother was quiet for a long time. I assumed she was thinking about how she would break the news to John that it wasn’t going to work out between them, so I didn’t interrupt. Finally my mother reached for my hands and said: “John and I are getting married.”

‘“Pardon?” I said, even though I’d heard her quite clearly.