Later, when she’s finally tumbled into sleep, exhausted by her ordeal and by her revelations, Martin wonders what she thinks of him, whether she has ever truly trusted him. Perhaps it would be more surprising if she did. First there was Tarquin Molloy, an undercover policeman who played her for a fool, picking her up only to send her spiralling downwards. And later there was Byron Swift, out in the scrublands, the homicidal priest who also lied and deceived. Will she ever truly open herself to him, tell him all of her past? Maybe. Maybe tonight is the start.
And in the dark, he feels a tug of guilt. For more than a year now, she has helped him come to terms with his own past, his childhood trauma, acting as his own personal counsellor. And not once has he questioned her about her own dysfunctional history. She’s alluded to her miserable childhood in Riversend, but never spoken about her twenties, the lost decade between leaving her home town and returning to it. Why hasn’t he asked? Is he really that self-centred?
She lies awake. The room is beginning to fill with light and the noise of traffic is ramping up as the city stirs. She must have slept, but she doesn’t feel like it. Instead, it’s as if she has tossed and turned all night. Beside her, Martin is snoring softly. At home in Port Silver, she’d find his wheezing irritating; here it’s a comfort. At least she has him. He’s taken it so well: this revelation that she was betrothed to another man, had loved Tarquin Molloy. She wonders once again why he persists with her, with her faults and her falsehoods. Why he trusts her.
But Martin is not the source of her anxieties and she knows it. It’s Tarquin; it’s always been Tarquin, playing with her, even now, toying with her sense of self. These past five years she believed he’d deceived her, that he won her trust in order to steal his millions and vanish. Left her empty-handed and empty-hearted, without a job, out on the streets with no discernible future. But that wasn’t what happened, she knows that now. Montifore told her: Tarquin hadn’t escaped, he’d been killed; Martin told her: he hadn’t been a thief, he’d been a cop. What does that mean?
Not a lot, when all is said and done. What difference does it make if he was an undercover investigator, probing the bank, or a fraudster, intent on stealing millions? He used her to access the bank’s systems; he betrayed her trust. Same thing.
And yet, once again, her thoughts wind back down into the labyrinth. She had always trusted the untrustworthy: Tarquin Molloy and Byron Swift and lesser lights like Billy the bass player. And they all ended up hurting her, betraying her faith in them. For God’s sake, she’d even been duped by that thug Livingstone, fooled into believing he was a cop. What is wrong with her? Is she as dumb as her hair colour suggests, like some bar-room joke rolled out for the amusement of half-cut bogans? Has she not progressed at all from her days on the street? Can Martin Scarsden really be any different? Is he laughing too? No, she tells herself, that is unfair and unworthy—but the thought stays with her, lingering, unable to be dismissed.
More like it’s herself she shouldn’t trust, her own faulty judgement.
A memory comes to her, so vivid she can smell it. The school bus between Riversend and the high school in Bellington, a forty-five minute drive there and a forty-five minute drive back across the arid plain, trapped inside with her classmates, trapped inside with the stigma: the bastard child, her mother unmarried, the progeny of scandal. Bastard. How the other children loved to spray the word about—carelessly repeating the slurs of their parents, supporters of her father—as if it didn’t hurt, more like a nickname than a weapon. Only she knew how hurtful it was, branding her as different, an outsider. And somehow, she’d come to believe she deserved it, that it was a penance she had to pay for her mother’s courage.
The smell is the same: the dust and the bus driver’s body odour, the heat of summer lifting chemicals from the vinyl seats, the boys’ excessive deodorant, the girls’ green-apple shampoo, the hint of a clandestine cigarette. It lasted four years, an eternity. Most days weren’t so bad, not objectively; when her fellow students had other things to entertain them, when they simply ignored her. But that made the trip no less laden with dread, sitting up behind the driver, reading her books, ears alert for incoming invective. Four years of hell, until somehow her mother found the money to send her to boarding school in Albury for her last two years.
The worst was Trina’s birthday. She hosted a party every year. On that Friday, the bus would stop at Trina’s kilometres-long driveway, out there on the plain, and practically the whole bus would alight, only some seniors remaining up the back. The balloons tied to the milk-can letterbox, laughter and excitement filling the air. The first year, it had caught her by surprise. She’d buried her face in her book, pretending not to notice. ‘Not you, love?’ the driver had asked, voice gentle, before putting the bus into gear and driving on. A weekend filled with tears.
Now, lying in bed, she contemplates the lesson of the school bus. She’d left it out there on the plain, once her karmic debt was paid, that’s what she’s believed. She’s done so well, these last few years, moving beyond Riversend and Sydney, finding sanctuary in Port Silver, putting distance between her and Tarquin Molloy and Byron Swift. Reinventing herself, a new Mandalay Blonde. Motherhood, her fresh start with Martin, her inheritance and the house on the cliffs: the foundations to a new and better life, a new and better her. She’s been a good mother,
