The Party Line (12 page)

Yvonne nodded. It was hard to see what she was thinking, her face was no different to how it would be if she was sitting at a library table reading a book. It wasn’t sad, or angry, or anything else.

‘Does he … Gabrielle, does he hit you, too?’

‘No,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Not me. He loves me. He’d never hit me.’

‘Gabrielle,’ said Yvonne. She took her arm away from the back of Gabrielle’s chair and she held Gabrielle’s hand. An old wrinkly grandma hand holding Gabrielle’s little girl hand. Gabrielle’s nail polish was exactly the same colour as her peach T-shirt. ‘I need to know. Does your mother know you’ve come to see me today? Because I can’t help you — I can’t help her — unless she knows. She’s got to be willing to be helped, Gabrielle.’

Gabrielle looked down again, but there were no tears this time.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t know we’re here.’

Inside Nickie, the lump shrunk just the tiniest bit.

‘Mum doesn’t even know that I know about the bashing. She pretends she’s clumsy, that she bumps into things, slips over. That’s how she explains the bruises.’

‘Have you tried telling her, Gabrielle, that you know it’s not true? Have you told her you’ve heard your dad hitting her in the night? That you’ve seen it?’ asked Yvonne.

Nickie didn’t understand how Yvonne kept her voice so calm, asking all these questions.

‘I did try, a few times,’ said Gabrielle. ‘But she doesn’t even answer me, if I start to talk about it. What she does is … so, I bring it up, and she always does the same thing.’

‘And what’s that?’

Nickie leaned forward into the conversation. She was as caught up in the story as Yvonne. Though, unlike Yvonne, who wanted to help, Nickie just wanted to know what happened next.

‘I say something …’ Gabrielle paused, looked Yvonne in the eye, and blinked quickly. More tears were appearing. Amazing. ‘I say something and Mum goes weird.’

‘What do you mean by weird?’ asked Yvonne.

‘She does the same thing nearly every time. She … she hangs out washing. As soon as I start talking, she can tell what’s coming. She just walks away from me and goes into the wash house. She picks up the clothes basket. If it’s full, she goes straight outside and hangs out washing. If it’s empty, she goes to the clothes line and brings the washing in no matter if she only put it out five minutes earlier, no matter if it’s soaking wet, she brings it in.’

‘Oh,’ said Yvonne.

The three of them sat without saying anything. It was only then that Nickie noticed the door to the Children’s Room was closed. Someone had shut it once Yvonne had come in. Nickie glanced at the big clock up on the wall. It felt as though they’d been sitting there whispering for hours, but only fifteen minutes had passed. Fifteen minutes of talking and no one had been in and they hadn’t been told off by the librarians.

Gabrielle was still telling the story about Mrs Gilbert and the washing.

‘If there’s no wet washing in the basket, and none on the line, it doesn’t matter. Mum will just grab anything, the first clothes or dirty stuff she can see. She puts it in the basket and then she goes outside and hangs it out.’

‘She hangs the dirty stuff out on the line?’ Yvonne asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gabrielle. ‘She hangs the dirty stuff out. She’s … I think she’s going mental.’

Yvonne took a big breath. Her hands were clasped together. She laid them flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.

‘Gabrielle,’ she said finally. ‘Your mum’s not … she’s not well. It’s complicated to explain … and I’d have to see your mum, talk to her, to know for sure, but it’s called a syndrome. That’s what your mother has. A syndrome.’

Yvonne was looking at Gabrielle, waiting for her to say something. She looked at Nickie, too. There was no chance in a million years that Nickie was going to say a word; she was barely managing to breathe.

Yvonne sighed. ‘This syndrome … it feels frightening, probably, for you. But sometimes, when people are in shock, or they’re stressed, they do strange things that have nothing to do with what’s just happened to them. They do something that’s really ordinary — like hang out the washing — while they’re waiting for their brains, their thoughts, to recover from the shock of everything.’

‘Like hang out washing when you’re being bashed up?’ said Gabrielle.

‘Like hanging out washing when you’re being bashed up,’ said Yvonne. ‘So the first time it happens — the first time the violence occurs — you do it without even thinking about it, because your body and your brain are shocked. Then, if the violence happens again, you do the same thing. It becomes a habit, without you even realising it.’

‘Mrs Gilbert does it in the middle of the night, even,’ Gabrielle said.

There was no sound in that library room. Nothing, except the scraping of the tree against the window and the sound of birds chirping outside.

Yvonne took her arm away from the back of Gabrielle’s chair. She
lifted her glasses off her face and placed them on the table in front of her. Her smile was gone, in its place a thin line of lips. She closed her eyes and rubbed her nose in the place where her glasses normally sat. Finally she spoke.

‘Gabrielle,’ she said. Her voice was different now. Cold. ‘It is Gabrielle, is it?’

Gabrielle nodded. She looked at Yvonne. Her eyes were clear and bright. If ever someone was going to cry, it would be now. But not her.

‘What’s going on?’

Gabrielle said nothing. But she wouldn’t back down from staring at Yvonne. A hard, clear stare.

‘Nickie?’

Nickie gulped. Yvonne had guessed she was the weakest, the one most likely to confess. ‘If you girls are fooling around, making things up, wasting my time …’

‘No,’ said Gabrielle. She reached out and grabbed Yvonne’s arm, just as Yvonne was starting to stand up. ‘We’re sorry. It is all true, what we’ve told you. I’m not her daughter, they’ve got no kids, but the rest of it is true. I’ve — we’ve — seen what he does to her, to Mrs Gilbert. We’re witnesses to the crime.’

‘So why did you pretend, Gabrielle?’ asked Yvonne. She sounded really tired. More like the normal grandma she actually might be. ‘What was the point of that?’

‘I wanted you to take me seriously, when I rang you up. Also, I know how it works,’ said Gabrielle.

‘How what works?’ Yvonne said. Her voice was not quite so hard now, but she was still pretty annoyed, you could tell.

‘I know that …’ Gabrielle looked up at the ceiling, blinking quickly. ‘I know that the call for help has to come from someone in the family. The victim, or the children of the victim. Otherwise … otherwise you can’t help.’

Yvonne was quiet. ‘So Gabrielle,’ she said after a bit. ‘How is it that you know all about it? You say—’ Yvonne looked at Nickie — ‘you say you’ve seen the violence against this Mrs Gilbert?’

Gabrielle nodded. Nickie nodded, too. As long as she didn’t say
anything, Nickie thought it might be okay. That she would not be involved.

‘You’ve both seen it?’

There was no escaping her attention now. She was concentrating on Nickie. ‘Nickie?’

‘Once. I’ve seen it once,’ Nickie said. It was barely a whisper.

‘But it happens all the time,’ said Gabrielle. ‘She’s got bruises on her all the time. Ever since I’ve known her.’

‘And how long is that?’ asked Yvonne.

‘About four months. My dad is their sharemilker. We live right next door. Well, not
right
next door, but we live the closest to the Gilberts out of anyone.’

‘Okaay …’ Yvonne seemed to be thinking things through. Nickie was thinking things through, too. Mainly she was thinking that there was hope for their survival after all, now that Yvonne knew they weren’t Gilberts.

‘Gabrielle,’ said Yvonne. ‘Have you thought about telling your own mother about what you know? About what you’ve seen? Because if your mother knew, she might be able to get Mrs Gilbert to come to see me. Like you girls have today.’

‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Mum’s dead. There’s just me and my dad.’

If Yvonne was starting to wonder how everything fitted together — Gabrielle knowing so much about men bashing women and syndromes and all the rest of it — well, she didn’t say a word about it. It hit Nickie, all of a sudden, how strange it was. Nickie Walker and Gabrielle Baxter sitting in the Thames Library on a Tuesday afternoon supposedly researching
I am David
but actually meeting with a person they didn’t know to report violence that they weren’t meant to have seen against a neighbour who never talked to them.

‘I … we should go now, Gabrielle,’ Nickie said, her voice quivering. ‘We’ll miss the bus back home. If we don’t go now.’

‘Nickie,’ said Yvonne. ‘What about you?’

‘What about me? What do you mean?’

‘Your mother, is what she means,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Do you think she
could talk to her? They’re friends anyway … it’d be best coming from your mum. Don’t you think?’

Yvonne was studying Nickie’s face. Nickie could see she was trying to work out whether she was brave enough to get involved. Well, the answer to that was easy. No. So she said it. ‘No.’

‘That’s fine, Nickie,’ she said. ‘It’s a lot to ask.’

Nickie couldn’t bring herself to look at Gabrielle.

‘So, is that it?’ said Gabrielle. ‘We can’t do anything?’

‘I would say your best chance of helping would be getting another adult — a mother — to talk to Mrs Gilbert herself,’ said Yvonne. Nickie could tell she was really just talking to Gabrielle now. She’d worked out that Nickie was chicken.

The meeting was over. They all left the Children’s Room together. Nickie looked back as they walked down the hallway. One of the librarians was turning the sign on the door over, from
Closed
to
Open
.

Every time Nickie took a step, her shoes fought to become part of the footpath. Gabrielle was quiet. Nickie wondered whether she, too, could see that many frightening things could happen now. Nickie counted off the adventures they’d had so far. Rescuing the bobby calves. Spying on the Gilberts in the middle of a stormy night. And now reporting what they’d seen to people they didn’t know, official people whose job it was to interfere. Every one of those things put them on course for trouble, for them and for other people. People Nickie had lived with her whole life. People that Gabrielle Baxter had lived with for just a few months.

‘Gabrielle,’ Nickie said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Gabrielle blew her fringe upwards. ‘Depends,’ she said.

‘On what?’

‘On what it’s about.’

She was talking about some of the things she’d said to Yvonne, Nickie could tell. Nickie wanted to ask her about those, but not yet.

‘How long do you reckon you’ll stay?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You and your dad … I just wondered. Some sharemilkers stay
for years and years, until everyone sort of forgets they’re sharemilkers. Then they end up buying their own farm and you forget they ever
were
. But others just stay for a year, or maybe two years, then they move somewhere else.’

Gabrielle kept walking.

‘So I just was wondering, you know. Wondering if you and your dad had ever talked about how long you were planning to live here.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We never have. This is our first turn at sharemilking — since Mum died, I mean. I suppose we’re just … seeing how things go.’

‘I hope you’re the sort that stays,’ Nickie said. Did she mean it? She wasn’t sure.

‘Me, too,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Especially now. Now we know about Mrs Gilbert.’

They didn’t speak again on the way to the bus stop. Nickie’s silence was for all the usual reasons — shock at what they’d just done, and fear at what might happen if anyone found out about it. It was a feeling she should have been used to, or at least getting used to, being the best friend of Gabrielle Baxter.

The bus home was full. There was lots of noise, people chatting all around them. Gabrielle spoke, after a while.

‘So, will you do it?’ she said. ‘Talk to your mum about Mrs Gilbert?’

‘No way.’

‘You heard what Yvonne said. It might be the only way we can rescue her.’

‘Gabrielle, think about it. How am I supposed to bring up something like that with Mum? What am I supposed to say? That we were out in the middle of the night and happened to be looking in their wash house window and saw … what we saw?’

Gabrielle wriggled in her seat. ‘You don’t have to say
when
we saw it, Nickie. It wouldn’t have been the first time Mr Gilbert’s done it. You heard what Yvonne said. That’s why she acts so weird with the washing.’

‘Weird full stop,’ Nickie said.

‘You all go on about her,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Even the adults, I’ve heard
them. You go on as though there’s something wrong with her. And all this time she’s getting beaten up by her husband and no one helps her.’

Nickie swallowed hard. Gabrielle was right. Again.

‘All the mothers, everyone who knows her. I can’t believe that someone hasn’t noticed the bruises. There must be bruises on her, Nickie, when you get up close to her.’

‘I know. I know there must be.’

‘So we have to do something. Don’t we? We have to do the right thing.’

‘Yes.’ It was barely a whisper.

In the end, it was easy.

Nickie dropped her bike at the back door. She’d get yelled at for that later, probably, but she knew she was going to get yelled at for a lot worse so it didn’t matter. She walked through the house, looking for her mother.

Joy was in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed. For a horrible minute, Nickie thought she had a migraine, and how bad that would be for the timing of everything. But Joy wasn’t doing anything, just sitting and staring out the window. Her hands were in her lap. She was holding a handkerchief, twisting it between her fingers, as though she was wringing water out of it.

‘Are you alright, Mum?’

Nickie’s voice seemed to snap her out of a dream. She gave Nickie a strange look, as though she really wasn’t sure who her daughter was.

‘Mum?’

Nickie lay on the bed beside her mother and closed her eyes. ‘You know how a while ago, you wanted me to tell you what was wrong?’