I’ve done something v bad. I can hardly write, it’s unreadable. My hand, I think it might be broken. Prob good if I stop.
I am going to try my left hand.
It is impossible.
That took me an hour.
That was a waste of a sentence.
I am drinking wine.
Ah, better now. Drink and paracetamol. I can write with my right hand again. Gotta tell you what I’ve done, and tbh it’s not seeming so bad anymore. I think there are worse things I could have done. I think there are worse things I will do if she doesn’t stop that banging.
*
I made it all the way from the house to the court without saying a word to Asha. Thankfully she didn’t try talking to me either. Her freedom was within reach. She was about to get her tag removed, she was about to be allowed to leave. I think she was planning to go straight to Richard and get him back. She didn’t look happy as such, but she wasn’t foaming with rage like she usually is. Come to think of it, she might have been praying to herself. That’s probably it, she was probs saying: dear god, let Richard be mine again, let him be mine. She was probably planning a giant resurrection event with Richard, or at least an erection one. It’s actually all that matters to her. Not Gee-suss or god or the holy ghost or heaven or dead Nellie, just The Dick. I was planning my WA trip in my head. And then we went inside and saw the two Rs talking to the lawyers in the corridor and both of us nearly fainted.
‘Richard, Richard,’ she yelled. She ran towards him. ‘Richard!’
He didn’t even look at her, or at me. He held Rowena’s hand and they scurried into the court and took a seat at the front with the prosecutor. I was offended, which is weird. Why hadn’t either of them looked at me either?
‘Why are they here?’ she kept saying.
Despite feeling a tad on her side, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t respond. I was still determined not to speak to her again. The judge hushed the court and she whispered:
‘What are they saying up there?’
When I didn’t respond she pushed against my arm with hers. I pushed back against it. Our pushes got harder, our whole bodies were involved. If one of us had stopped the other would have been bowled over.
‘What are they whispering? Oi!’
She pinched my arm this time, no poke. It hurt so much I almost said something really loudly that would not have been appropriate in court.
‘What’s going on, you know something, don’t you?’
They called her up to the naughty chair and everything went from bad to worse. The prosecutor outlined her breaches – she had attempted to make contact with the victim by phone on 112 occasions; via her Facebook account on twelve occasions and on a fake Facebook account on thirty-six occasions. Her sister had harassed the pastor and his wife – going so far as to visit their place of worship. She then followed them to their house to beg for information and contact. But the worst thing, the clincher, was that Asha had left our house illegally, breaching the conditions of her electronic monitoring, then visited the grave of their dead child, where she lay on the tomb and disturbed the earth around it. Desecrated. She had desecrated little Nellie’s grave. She was a monster.
Yes, yes, I thought, she is a monster, but not for those reasons.
Before I knew it they were talking about further assessments – a three-week period during which she would need alcohol counselling and a mental-health assessment. This could either take place on remand or at home with the ankle bracelet.
Remand, I was thinking, remand.
It took a moment for me to realise the lawyers and the judge were asking me something. Was the family willing to have her in the home again?
Asha was giving me a look I hadn’t seen for weeks (and not very often before then when I come to think of it): sad, pathetic, vulnerable. I liked it. ‘Please, please,’ she mouthed from the naughty chair.
Could I really say no and send her to jail? So tempting. The answer to my prayers in fact.
Richard and Rowena both gave me scathing looks. I was scum like Asha. Stalking scum. And at that moment I hated the two of them more than I hated Asha. They had started the whole Rise Nellie thing. They were liars. They were deranged brainwashers. It wasn’t Asha’s fault.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am her sister and I live at the address and I agree to having her there.’
Asha didn’t try to talk to Richard again. She walked right by them and out of the court. Something had changed in her.
We walked back to the house together, not saying a word.
My arm was red from the pinch, and although I was filled with rage about the two Rs and had agreed to help her in court, I did not intend to communicate with her ever again.
As we walked past the shops she said: ‘He doesn’t love me.’
Poor Asha. She had finally realised. I could feel the despair in my tummy too.
‘I want to kill him,’ she said.
I understood.
‘Promise you’ll stop me killing him,’ she said.
I kept walking. I would not be drawn in.
‘Camille, please, promise me you won’t let me kill him?’
Fuck, I was going to have to speak. ‘I promise,’ I said.
‘Have you got any money? Can we get booze?’
‘Can you buy me some wine? I need to get drunk.’
Kept walking. Mouth zipped.
‘I haven’t got any money. Can you give me some money please?’ she said. ‘I’ll go in and get it.’
I didn’t give her money, didn’t say a word. My escape to an underground mine in Western Australia was no longer. I was stuck here again, making promises. I could hardly believe it had happened.
‘Did you tell Richard I was at the cemetery?’
Don’t say a word, Cam, not a word. Even though I hadn’t told them. Must have been the cops. I can do this, I repeated to myself, I’ll do these three weeks, but I will not speak to her.
‘You despise me, don’t you? All you want is to hurt me.’
I walked faster. Just get home, just get to the house and into your room, I was thinking. I was a few feet ahead of her.
Suddenly I felt her shove my back. I catapulted forward and did a slow-motion fall that I tried to break with my hand – in doing so I think I actually broke my hand. It’s doubled in size. I have a huge graze on my hand and on my knee. I can’t walk properly. I nearly landed on my face. A middle-aged couple saw what happened, but they said nothing. They smiled at each other and walked on by. ‘Takes me back,’ one was probably recalling affectionately to the other. ‘My sister pushed me off a ladder once.’
I upped the pace, got to the front door and inside. ‘There’s wine in my room,’ I said.
‘I knew it.’ She ran to my room, rummaged through my clothes, through my drawers, under my duvet. ‘Where?’
It was time to divulge my secret hiding place. I moved the faux sheepskin covered gym mat, exposing the huge bluestones underneath.
Unimpressed at the bare flooring, she readied herself to throttle me. I wondered how she’d do it this time, with her fists, with a sculpting tool, with the screwdriver?
‘There’s a cellar under here,’ I said, kneeling down and retrieving the flat screwdriver I had hidden under my pillow since changing rooms. I levered the crack and one of the huge heavy stones moved. I prised it open until it was leaning against the wall. It was a hatch.
‘Oh my god,’ she said, looking down into the dark hole.
I put my phone torch on to illuminate the ladder, and I went down first. I’d made it quite pleasant in the last few days. I lit the gas lamp Mum found in a skip behind the Methodist church and a few of the candles we’d failed to sell at the open house. The two goon sacks of dry red were sitting on one of the three beautiful wooden barrels, and so were you, DD. I put you down my jeans while she was wandering around, wowing. It was tempting not to tell her about the mine shaft in the corner.
BTW, the mine shaft is HUGE, about six by six feet. The earth around it is all soft – looks like the shaft was covered and hidden and has just recently opened up on its own. I’ve dropped bottles down there and didn’t even hear them smash. The local mine shaft chasers would come in their pants. So dangerous. Probably why the cellar has been closed off and kept secret.
I decided I’d better let Asha know.
‘Be careful in the corner,’ I said. ‘Must be an old claim. Goes down for miles.’
She was checking out the dusty bottles of ancient wine on the wooden shelves. There were six altogether. 1895. Good enough for her.
The cellar was half the size of the property. I discovered it when we moved rooms. Sleeping on the floor, as I was forced to do, I noticed a draft coming through the crack and took a closer look. When Asha was busy praying and singing I’d jam the bedroom door with the desk and open it up. It had been my escape, I loved it. I had water and biccies and a few books down there too, which was lucky, because I had an idea. A really good one.
‘I’ll go get some glasses, shall I?’ I grabbed one of the goon sacks of dry red and walked back up the ladder. I could hear Asha popping a cork and laughing.
‘This actually tastes okay – like caramel!’
Then I slammed the bluestone hatch down again.
‘Hey, hey!’ she yelled. ‘What are you doing?’ She was knocking at it from underneath, trying to push it. ‘Hey, are you kidding me?’
She probably couldn’t move the stone. It weighed a ton. I always left it fully open when I went down. I stood on top of the hatch as she banged and yelled, and I hammered at the screws in the base of the pottery wheel that Dad had loosened days earlier. It only took a few more smashes and they broke off. Then I dragged it and placed it on top of the hatch. She’d never be able to get out now.
*
The glass door at the back hasn’t been fixed. Asha is so lazy; the place looks like a meth-house. Uncle James has left a really annoying note telling me to fix it. He’s such a wanker, Uncle James. But I will sort it, course I will. I’m in the courtyard and ahhhh, DD, the wine is working and the paracetamol too. The sun is shining so hard that I could be in Perth. The deckchair Mum found in Meyer’s Lane is so comfy and my earphones have cut out all that screaming and banging. I know I’ve been bad and that I’ll be wanting forgiveness soon, but for now, I am going to drink myself into oblivion.