Mothers and Daughters (33 page)

‘I know,’ Bronte snarled without looking back. ‘Want to take a photo? You’ll be able to post it tonight, once we’re in Broome.’

Her mother had handed her a box of tampons. Bronte sat on the toilet holding one in her hand, the instruction leaflet in the other. She studied it closely, then tried again to insert the tampon, but it was hopeless. She didn’t have a clue what she was doing, and everything was so messed with blood. She needed more than a tiny diagram to find the right spot. She needed a GPS.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Bronte? It’s Caro. Janey told me what happened.’

Bronte rolled her eyes. Of course she did.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Caro went on, ‘but I came over to see if I could help. I’ve got some wipes if you like, just in case you want to . . . clean up a bit. And I brought some pads. Your mum said she just had Meds.’ The door opened a crack.

‘Don’t come in!’ Bronte cried.

‘I’m not going to,’ Caro said. ‘I just wanted to give you these.’ A yellow packet fell to the floor. Bronte stared at it.
Sure and Natural
. She sniffed. Nothing about this felt particularly natural. ‘And the wipes too,’ Caro went on, pushing something else through the gap. ‘Keep them both. I can get more in Broome if I need them. Hand me out your shorts and your undies. I’ll rinse them and put them in a plastic bag. Your mum will pass in some clean ones. Now, do you know how to use the pads?’

‘I’m sure I can work it out,’ said Bronte.

Caro was still there when she emerged clean and changed, but somewhat awkwardly ten minutes later. How did women get used to this? She felt as if she had a mattress between her legs.

‘Are you OK?’ Caro asked. Behind her, Fiona leaned over the bed, struggling to do up her suitcase.

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Bronte said stiffly. ‘You can go now if you like.’ Caro must still be feeling bad about yesterday, she thought, hanging around and washing her shorts. Still, she was glad that someone had. She couldn’t have faced it.

‘I wanted to see you,’ Caro said. ‘I wanted to say congratulations. You’re a woman now.’

Fiona snorted, then pretended she’d coughed.

‘It’s a big deal,’ Caro continued, ignoring Fiona. ‘It really is, Bronte. Don’t feel embarrassed. You should be proud.’ Before Bronte realised what she was doing, Caro had wrapped her arms around her and pulled her close. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you differently.’

For the second time that hour, Bronte blinked away tears. A woman. She wondered if Ms Drummond would be able to tell when she went back to school, if she would notice immediately that Bronte had finally grown up. And then, because Caro had been so kind and was holding her so closely, she hugged her back.

Caro looked at her watch. It was the first time she’d checked it in days. She’d been a while with Bronte in the bathroom, but she still had time, as long as she was quick. Heavens knows, after the way Janey had behaved it was the least she could do, but she would have wanted to help out anyway. She genuinely liked Bronte. Loved her, maybe. The children that grew up alongside yours made their own place in your heart.

She’d send him something, Caro decided as she negotiated the track to the beach for the final time. She wanted to thank Mason somehow for all he’d done for her—for taking her out fishing and looking after her when she got stung; for helping her with that dreadful Facebook situation without asking any questions—but there was nothing here she wanted to buy for him. The store only seemed to stock junk food, and the beautiful crafts for sale at the gallery were nothing new
to him. His wife Aki probably knocked them up between changing nappies. She felt a prickle of derision. They had so many children. Too many children. Maybe she could send him a gift voucher for a vasectomy clinic.

The water appeared between the trees, flashing blue and silver in the morning light. In the distance Caro could see Mason sitting out on the point, his legs dangling in the water, and was immediately ashamed of her bitchy thoughts. What did it matter to her how many kids he had? She’d never see him again after today; she’d get back to Melbourne and put something in the mail for him and that would be it. But what? Alcohol was out of the question, of course—a shame, when that was always the easiest option. Often she sent people hampers of the lovely foodstuffs Alex imported—stuffed olives, piquant cheeses, tiny biscuits as delicately and intricately constructed as the handmade lace he’d once brought back for her from the island of Burano—but she couldn’t imagine Mason eating biscuits. They’d probably get broken in the post, anyway. She trudged on through the sand. A book? Clothes? A CD? She wasn’t sure if he even listened to music . . . Western music, that was, not that funereal tune from last night.

Last night. Oh, that had been awkward. She could barely look at Fiona or Bronte—or her own daughter, for that matter. She probably shouldn’t have slapped Janey—but God, she’d been furious. And scared, she admitted to herself. Mostly scared. Scared of what her own flesh and blood was capable of, scared of the gulf opening up between them and of the years that lay ahead. It would be a terrible thing to lose a child to cancer or an unfenced pool, but sometimes she wondered if
it wasn’t almost as bad losing them bit by bit, watching them turn their back on you and stride into the world. April still loved her forcefully, unconditionally, with a devotion that made Caro’s heart contract. In April’s eyes, her mother could do no wrong, was beautiful and competent and always, always right. Just the night before she’d come up here, Caro had gone into her youngest daughter’s room to check that she hadn’t kicked off her doona, and April had heard her, roused briefly, and mumbled, ‘I love you, Mummy. You’re so perfect for me,’ before falling back to sleep. Tears welled in Caro’s eyes as she remembered that moment. She missed April—but she missed Janey too, the Janey who used to happily chatter to her in the car as Caro drove her to and from squad, not hook herself up to her iPod and stare unseeingly out the window; the Janey who asked Caro’s opinion on her outfits or told her what was happening with her friends. Children were a cruel trick. They shouldn’t be allowed to grow up.

‘Hello!’ Mason waved as she picked her way over the rocks towards him. ‘Headin’ for the big smoke today?’

‘No, Melbourne’s tomorrow,’ Caro replied, then caught herself. ‘Oh—you mean Broome, don’t you?’

‘Broome’s the big smoke to us.’ He grinned.

Caro cleared a space among his fishing gear and sat down next to him. Barnacles bit into her thighs and bottom but she didn’t get up. She didn’t want him thinking she was soft. ‘We’re leaving soon,’ she said. ‘Amira’s taking us somewhere to see a staircase, I think she called it, then the flight goes at eleven tomorrow.’

‘The staircase to the moon,’ Mason said. ‘That must be the last one for the year. It never appears durin’ the wet, you know. You’re lucky you’re around for it.’

Caro nodded dutifully. She didn’t know, she had no idea. She didn’t really care, to be honest. Amira had said that it was something to do with the mudflats, but she’d had her fill of mudflats after crabbing yesterday. ‘Tess told me you’d be here. I came to thank you before we went.’

‘Thank me? For what?’

‘Your help yesterday with picking up the internet.’ She felt sick at the memory of it, of standing on these very rocks silently praying for a signal, Janey glowering beside her, one cheek still stained red. ‘And for when I got stung while we were fishing—for taking me back in again.’

Mason chuckled. ‘I wasn’t goin’ to toss you overboard.’

‘No, I know, but I interrupted your fishing,’ said Caro, all too aware she was doing it again. ‘I’d like to send you something from Melbourne, to show my gratitude. Maybe something that you can’t get here. Is there anything you want?’

Mason slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve got everythin’ I need.’ He adjusted his reel, then asked, ‘Is it healin’ OK?’

‘I haven’t looked,’ Caro admitted. ‘I’m not good with that sort of thing, but it feels fine. It’s stopped throbbing. I’ll have it checked by my GP when I get back to Melbourne, just to be sure.’

‘Show me.’ Mason gestured for her to give him her arm.

‘It’s fine,’ Caro repeated. ‘There’s really no need . . .’

But Mason wasn’t listening. Slowly, with infinite care, he had taken her forearm into his lap and released the silver clasp on the bandage. Then, starting at her wrist, he gently unwound it. It felt, Caro thought, like being undressed. She looked out to the horizon to try to distract herself; then she stared at her toenails, the varnish all chipped. Mason was peeling back the last layer now, his fingers deft and somehow tender. For a moment his dark skin rested against her pale flesh, and she had a sudden vision of the two of them in bed together, naked, black against white, curled around each other like a yin-yang symbol.

‘Sorry—did that hurt?’ asked Mason. ‘You’ve got goosebumps.’ He bent over her arm. ‘It’s lookin’ good. Healin’ well. You’re going to have a scar though.’ Softly, he traced the raised red welt with one rough fingertip. Caro closed her eyes. She was being ridiculous, pathetic. She loved Alex; she would never dream of straying. ‘A souvenir,’ Mason went on. ‘Somethin’ to remind you of Kalangalla. Like a tattoo, only more original.’

Caro’s head swum. It was the heat that was making her dizzy, surely, and the sleepless night fretting about Janey.

Mason looked up, stared into her eyes. ‘You were lucky,’ he pronounced. ‘It could have been Irukandji—we’re comin’ up to their time of year. You could be dead right now. Remember that next time you get worried about somethin’, it still beats bein’ dead.’

Later, as she sat in the troop carrier bouncing along the road towards Broome, Caro turned the words over in her mind. Did Mason know how crippled she was by anxiety at times? Had he sensed that she was uptight when they were trying to
access that Facebook picture? Perhaps Amira had told him about the panic attack she’d had beforehand. Caro knew she wouldn’t have, though; Amira wasn’t like that. He must just have guessed . . . or maybe he was speaking generally.

Caro smiled wryly to herself. She was doing exactly what he’d told her not to: worrying. But she wasn’t going to worry anymore, she decided. Mason was right. She could be dead, yet she wasn’t, and surely that outweighed everything else. A shot of pure happiness went through her, effervescent and fleeting, but intoxicating nonetheless. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to celebrate these final moments of the trip. As she loosened her seatbelt and leaned across the aisle to talk to Morag she realised something else: she had wanted to give Mason a gift, but he had handed her one instead.

Tess lay on her back, looking up through the palm trees and into the night sky. More stars were coming out, shyly poking their faces through the indigo shawl draped above her. Could she remember their names? The bright one was Venus—a planet, not a star, she corrected herself. Back at the end of the last wet, when the nights were warm enough to sleep outside with just a blanket, she’d camped out once or twice with Tia and her family on the beach at Kalangalla, and Mason had pointed out the constellations for them. Tess had no idea how he remembered them all—the sky up here was full of stars, bursting with them—but he’d shown them the Dreaming stars, as he called them, the emu and the serpent. They were
different, he’d told her, from the ones she might have learned about at school. What the whitefella called Orion was actually Julpan, a canoe. Could she see it? There was the bow, and there was the stern, and the bright stars between them were two brothers who’d gone fishing, but one had eaten a fish that was forbidden by their law and so the sun had dragged the two boys and their canoe into the sky and beached them there . . . She’d wanted to ask him why the fish was forbidden, but she must have fallen asleep, lulled by the dance of his dark arms against the Milky Way. As soon as she was back she would do so, she resolved. And it was nearly the wet again. They could have another sleepout, lots of them, her and Tia and Mason and Aki and the tumbling little boys. Maybe her mother would come this time. She’d be interested in the canoe.

‘Tess! Sit up! You’re going to miss it all!’ said Bronte.