Title: Jessa Called Jay
Chapter 5: Thursday's Child
Author: Elliott Silver
Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.
Author's Note: Thank you to all my steadfast and supportive readers. For those worrying about Phryne: fear not. She has her own story and her own reasons, which she will share in a later chapter.
/ - / - / - / - / December 1930 / - / - / - / - /
Jack Robinson is released from the hospital on a sunny day just before Christmas 1930.
His knee isn't fully healed – it might never be – so he relies on crutches. They are damned precarious things and he despises them ardently. Even the shortest excursions leave him winded and dizzy, so living in his three-story walk-up in Richmond, where he grew up, is out of the question.
He moves – or rather, is moved - to a bungalow in Elwood. He can hardly afford this section of town, and the house reflects the low asking price.
Outside the tiny yard is a riot of overgrown golden wattle and bottlebrush, a startling contusion of red and yellow that brings bees he can hear even at night. Inside the paint is peeling, the floorboards uneven, and the windows rattle at the faintest hint of wind. The house has obviously seen better days, but then so has he.
It comes to him quite clearly: he is not a hero; he is a cripple.
The shock of it overwhelms him. He doesn't know himself, doesn't know the world without his work in it. The days seem endless, the nights worse. In the darkness he can't sleep, and everything – even breathing – hurts.
He isn't sure he can survive – in fact, he doesn't want to.
Then she comes.
/ - / - / - / - /
The sun is bright on the day she walks up the overgrown path to his porch.
Jack is sitting on the tilted and rickety porch swing, his leg outstretched on the broken railing, a beer in hand rather than coffee. It's after noon (at least, he thinks, it must be), but he's just gotten up, shoving off the lumpy sofa where he sleeps (if he does). He wants to, but so many nights, he can't, thrashing against new pain and old dreams. He takes the pills Mac gave him because it is easy, washed down with whisky, and later hates himself for it. He doesn't know how to survive otherwise, clawing himself from day to day. Besides, it doesn't really matter, he's found, when your days consist of limping from bed to seat to toilet and back again. The change in space doesn't affect his bitter perception of the world.
Jack Robinson has escaped the large injuries so miraculously that he'd forgotten how much the little ones still hurt. Released from the larger catastrophe of murder charges, he'd failed in remembering the smaller but no less significant wreck of his life before them. If he was not to blame for the former, he must be for latter.
He'd forgotten that his life had been a tragedy that was no less catastrophic, or perhaps, a catastrophe that was no less tragic.
He had forgotten, but it comes back to ravage him now.
He'd begun drinking soon after Phryne left, at first just a tumbler at the end of the day because she wasn't there to share it with him. He'd missed her, the sound of her voice down hallways, the twitch of her head and curl of her smile, the smell of her Floris perfume as her body pressed against. Then, when he couldn't sleep, when he couldn't forget, he drank more.
He ended up drinking quite a lot.
Now he doesn't even have his job to keep him sane, so perhaps he isn't. He falls back into those bad habits, perhaps without meaning to, perhaps without trying not to. He'd do anything to stop thinking, to stop remembering what's past, what's gone, what can never come back – his knee, his heart, Phryne.
But in the end, he knows it's a losing venture.
He knows he's can't.
A storm had passed through the night before, sweeping the sky so clean that the light stings his eyes. He squints as this woman comes to him now, her short hair blazoned with sun and shine. She is wrapped in a halo of light, hair blonde, dress blue, a walking piece of the world that has left him behind, or that he has left it.
Jay Tayler climbs the steps to the porch and stands before him.
He hasn't seen her in – well, he can't remember. Time seems to have slipped away from him somehow, blustery spring turning into blazing summer. He's only been out of the hospital for a few weeks, but it seems like a year, this escape from one purgatory to the next.
It seems like all of eternity.
He'd assumed she'd gone back to Sydney, someone else to flit in and out of the shreds of his life. After all, what was there to keep you in Melbourne when the rest of the world beckons?
The reporter doesn't say anything at first, but peers in the dusty window, pushing aside the branches of wattle, golden and fluffy with flowers. If she can see anything through the marred glass, she will see only mismatched pieces of furniture and unpacked boxes, his life left in jumbled and unlabeled cardboard containers.
When she finally looks at him, leaning against the cracked balustrade, her eyes are so hard it hurts.
"Is this what you're going to do with your life?"
Jack feels her disappointment. He wonders if he looks worse than when she saw him last, when he was in the hospital, if that is even possible. His bruises may have faded, but he hasn't shaved and his rough beard must rival only the tangled thicket of his unkempt hair. Only a patterned bathrobe hides the rest of him, the bone-and-reed husk of who he once was. Still he can't bring himself to care even under the scrutiny of her leaf and thunder eyes.
"What am I supposed to do?"
He gestures with his half-empty beer at the crutches, at a world he can no longer reach. No one asked him if he wanted to live, if he wanted to be saved, which, Jack thinks, is unfair, because he never decided he did and now he is stuck with it, with life.
"Besides," he asks crossly, "who are you to care?"
She doesn't answer but propels herself upright with such ease that he is jealous.
"Come with me," she says suddenly, "and I'll tell you."
Immediately he wants to say no, to refuse, but there's something in him, some old and latent spark, that resists, that refuses to be broken.
"Come," she says, more softly, and offers him her hand. "Come with me."
He takes it and she pulls him towards her, upwards on such a graceful arc of gravity and hope that he realizes she has created a miracle, of him standing on his own two feet.
He shuffles inside and stands in the dim room, perplexed and terrified now that he has agreed. He has no idea where his things are, but he upends the nearest box and finds a pair of trousers and a shirt he hopes is less rumpled than it looks (he fears he's bound for disappointment there). Quickly he brushes his teeth and rakes his fingers through his hair, though he isn't sure it helps.
His stubble glints grey in the light as he comes back out. (He certainly doesn't trust himself with a razor.)
"Let's go," she says before he can refuse.
He sways forward on her irrepressible energy, leaning heavily on his crutches. His farthest walk since he left the hospital has been from the cab to his front room. He isn't sure he can manage the porch stairs, much less any farther than that.
Yet she steps forward and the distance between them yawns as a chasm.
"Thursday's child," she says as he wavers.
"What?"
"You asked who I was," the reporter answers and from the back places of his memory he remembers the rhyme.
"I was born in North Carolina, in America, on Thursday, October 10, 1902."
She moves and he follows, reciting the words in his head. Monday's child was fair of face, Tuesday's child full of grace. He forgets what the future held for anyone born on Wednesday, but she, as Thursday's child, would have far to go.
His first step is agony, and every one thereafter more unbearable. By the fifth step he's sure he isn't going to make it. They haven't even reached the road yet, but her back is to him, her face to the sun and the water in front of them, the smell of it sweet with salt.
"I don't remember my mother," she says and keeps moving, always just out of reach so he has no choice but to try. "She left when I was four."
She talks and he hobbles, and somehow they make it to beach café on the Ormond Esplanade. They sit (she disdainfully, as if she hates the thought of being immobile; him gratefully, because he hates the thought of getting up again).
She orders him black coffee and a hot pie with lamb mince. She sips tea and watches the ocean behind him. He wipes at the sweat on his face, twitching his shoulder as it drips coldly down his spine. His back, the band of his trousers, is soaked with it. By contrast, his knee feels like it's on fire, skin and bone burning like the throbbing in his head, so violent he feels nauseous with it.
He wishes for the bottle of pills; he wishes for a bottle of whisky.
He wishes Jay Tayler would keep talking, and then she does.
The reporter tells him about her childhood, what she remembers of it, the thick southern heat and sugar-sweet tea, the Spanish moss and flame azaleas, the nights so hazy and deep you could fall through darkness and never stop. Tansy Tayler had married at age eighteen, to defy her strict Southern Baptist parents and because she was already four months' pregnant. Her husband Robert was solid Australian stock. He had gone to California to work for the railroads and had somehow worked his way backward to the east coast, "manifest destiny" in reverse. What had begun with enchantment ended with soiled diapers, curdled milk, and soot that left black marks on everything, even her baby skin. As a child, she remembers little except fragments of broken crockery and the soft voice of the sheriff trying to explain that her mother was gone. She hears the words but they don't fit; she can't make sense of them. She won't be able to, not until another muddle of years passes, and the sheriff returns, repeating the same thing about her father. Even at such a young age, she realizes something very clearly: she realizes that being gone is worse than death.
It's the not knowing that hurts so badly.
Jack looks up. His plate is empty, vanished clean but for a few crumbs, his coffee having been refilled twice, her tea refreshed once, though the bottoms of their cups are long since dry.
"What happened then?" he asks.
"Then," she answers, "is another story."
"I have time."
His answer surprises them both. It's the first glimmer of interest he's felt in ages.
It is something, it is everything.
"Lunch, then," she says, and smiles. "Thursday?"
/ - / - / - / - /
"Ready?"
She shows up precisely as promised, the noonday Thursday heat rolling over them softly. January 1931 has dawned clear and hopeful. The sky is scudded with clouds today, the heavens above gingham in white and blue.
Jack has been ready since she asked, having managed both bathing and shaving with a fairly steady hand. He is relieved that she doesn't peek through the window to see the wreckage of upturned boxes, of clothes and books and kitchen utensils scattered within, evidence of his struggle to excavate the respectable suits he used to wear (though they no longer fit as he remembered).
"Yes."
He leans on his crutches and pushes himself forward.
"I arrived in Australia in 1909," she begins as they start down the street, shade trees billowing overhead. Canary Island date palms and London planes whirl in the breeze, shadows sliding like kaleidoscopes. "Quite against my wishes, if anyone cared, which they didn't."
They walk past the café on the esplanade – she didn't care for the cake, she says – until they find another further along on St. Kilda Street, across from Elsternwick Park and the cricket club.
She says she barely remembers the long trip by ship, possibly because she's deemed a wildcat, a hellion, and sent to her tiny cubicle below deck so often that there are whole days she isn't allowed to venture out.
"Why can't you be a lady?" she is asked.
"Because it's a man's world," Jay answers.
All too soon and not quickly enough, the ship arrives at port. She doesn't know what to expect when she walks down the long plank to the dock and her new life. She certainly doesn't expect this silent, white-haired man who had never been farther from Canberra than Sydney in his life, her grandfather, Thomas Tayler.
She grows up on a cattle station with a kindness and freedom she never imagined. She can't imagine borders or boundaries, because here there are none, or they are so far away as to be imaginary. Her hair grows long and tangled, her skin glows brown, her eyes simmer into the peculiar grey-green sheen of eucalyptus mist in the mountains.
Her grandfather isn't given to conversation, and knows nothing about the proper raising of a seven year-old girl, so instead of sailor dresses and summer frocks for boarding school, he gives her a boy's britches, a horse and work. He teaches her how to shoot, how to tie the lash of a whip so it cracks like the world breaking in two, how to deal with the sharp things of life like barbed wire and flick knives, like silence and solitude. Her school is the outdoors, her lessons by correspondence, her only friends the brittle books in her grandfather's parlor.
It ends with her grandfather's death in 1915, two days after her thirteenth birthday and two months before the last Australian troops are evacuated from Gallipoli (a young Lance Corporal John Robinson being one). She couldn't have known how far in debt they were, how cattle sales had plummeted in the years since she arrived, but she was duly informed by a solicitor unimpressed with his penniless young charge, soon deposited, amidst biting, kicking, and as much unladylike language as he hopes ever to hear in his life, to a charity school in Canberra. It will be her home for the next two years of her life.
"And then?" Jack asks.
The ocean wind has gotten cooler; there's another storm blowing over the water. He can feel it in his bones as she shivers.
"And then there was trouble."
/ - / - / - / - /
Jack Robinson wakes and realizes he is not unhappy. It's grey as dishwater outside, a ragged veil of rain and fog dripping miserably over the earth, but he can't wait to get up.
It's Thursday.
He looks forward to lunch with Jay Tayler.
He swings his legs to the side of the lumpy sofa. The one twinges, but he stands and walks through the pain. Every day is a bit less; every day is a little better. It isn't easy, but what in life is?
As he moves, he thinks about the blonde reporter.
He likes that she is honest and brave. He likes her short yellow hair and eucalyptus eyes, the way she smiles when she thinks no one's looking, the way she laughs when she knows he is. He likes that she doesn't push people, but pulls them instead, drawing them to her on invisible silken ties.
He is pulled.
It takes time but they find a café they both like – he for the shepherd's pie, and she for the pavlova – on Ruskin Street. They become on first-name basis with the owners, Paul and Hilda, and each other.
"Call me Jack," he says as rain patters overhead, with a perfect sense of déjà vu. "Everyone does."
Her smile holds even as she hesitates.
"Call me Jessa, then," she replies. "No one does anymore."
He hears the last word, the soft way she shares this with him, her name.
"Jessa," he says, letting her name roll over his tongue. "Jessa called Jay."
She's been just Jay for so long that she hardly remembers being called otherwise, but her name sounds so beautiful in his voice.
"Tell me what happened."
He echoes the words she spoke to him in the hospital room.
She hasn't spoken of her past since their conversation several weeks ago, but he wants to know.
It takes longer but she tells him what she means by trouble, what it is to a young girl left alone in the world.
While ANZAC forces flail in the mud of the Western front, at Menin Road, Polygon Wood, and Passchendaele in 1917, a young Jessa Tayler escapes into the Canberra streets.
It begins to simply enough, in juvenile rebellion and misplaced grief. She doesn't fit in at the charity school, knowing too much and perhaps too little, more advanced in lessons than the spinster teachers but ignorant in the groupthink of girls. They don't like her, and she doesn't like them. They tease and tattle until she retaliates, sneaking nettles in the smalls drawer, laundry blue in the showerheads, slugs into their bedsheets.
She virtually lives in the solitary room (which she doesn't mind at all) and is stripped of meal privileges (which she does). Her stomach grumbles as she jimmies the window as usual and climbs out.
She has done this many times before, but tonight it is different. Tonight she lands on her feet and doesn't look back.
Here, there is the pull of the unknown, and the push of boundaries once crossed never gone back. She doesn't understand these lines of demarcation well enough, she will think later. She doesn't yet know that there are invisible borders that keep things in as much as they keep them out.
So she escapes into Fyshwick, the industrial part of town, where boys and old men (for all those in between are fighting the war) trudge back and forth in pre-arranged patterns of misery. Here, she knows, there is suffering that makes hers pale by comparison.
Her stomach growls ravenously as she looks towards the pie cart at the end of the street, even though she knows she has no money and she knows the pie man has a revolver.
She begins to move anyway until a hand holds her back.
Jay looks up into the face of a young man with bright eyes and russet hair. She's seen him before, loping in the streets, doing nothing yet seeing everything.
She doesn't know his name, but she knows he's a smuggler. It's all the talk of the news, of the headmistress loudly at tea, of the girls in whispers at night. They know little more than what they hear, but when she'd first arrived at the charity school, one of the older residents had procured a packet of cigarettes laced with opium. The heady fumes swirled around the room, and within a week she was gone. The girls tell that she was unceremoniously ejected onto the street, but Jay thinks she must have left of her own accord, because anything is better than this anchorite half-life.
Two policemen amble up the street, chatting as they come. They pass by every night, patrolling for illicit trade, be it drugs, women, or homemade brews. They exchange quick greetings with the pie man, unsuspecting, even as another line of other men come up behind, carrying large crates and slipping into the building behind them. They file inside unseen until a crash mars the night.
The policemen immediately turn and walk forward.
Beside her the man with the fox-colored hair stiffens, fingers biting into her shoulder.
There are moments when life becomes clear, when it is impossible to look back and understand why we do the things we do, how we understood to do them so quickly. Jessa will look back and think that as she runs forward, bumping between both the officers and snatching a pie from the cart. The pie man's angry bellow follows her, and the two officers yell out, swinging their batons. She darts into an alley and lets them rush past, heart whumping in her chest so hard she almost see stars. When the night is clear, she slips out, devouring the cooling pie. Her only regret is that she didn't grab more.
She makes her way back to the main street. The pie man is gone, but the young smuggler is standing outside the red building, smoking. Tendrils slip up into the night like patterns of lace.
"Quick thinking," he says as she leans against the wall next to him.
She nods but doesn't speak.
"Lee Turner," he says, holding out his hand.
"Jay Tayler," she answers, taking it.
He considers her carefully.
"Want a job?"
It's really just that easy, a simple nod of her head. Lee gives her directions, she follows them. She begins running for him, taking messages and packages from place to place. She knows what's in them, the sticky black opium balls, the dark bottles of morphine labeled as laudanum, the crisp packets of heroin, shipped secretly from China, but she doesn't ask.
The market has never been better. By 1918, the soldiers begin to return home, wounded, shattered, desperate. They form a bulk of new clients, along with women whose men do not return, whose grief might be alleviated by the dark liquids of a stoppered bottle. Jay can't bring herself to think this trade wrong, not when it provides such relief.
Soon Lee takes her with him to Sydney, where trade is booming. She knows no one here, but she knows him, and that is enough. The unimposing young man with the red hair and stained-glass eyes, with that indifferent swagger and off-tune whistle, is the head of the celestial-sounding Black Stars, one of the most powerful opium importers and smuggling operations between Hongkong and the Australian coast. Every boat that comes in brings their product, and their networks slips from dockside to cityscape like blood vessels from a beating heart.
The trade is illegal, and life here is nothing if not precarious. All it takes is a freak slip on the wharf or a few grains more of white powder, though more likely a chance meeting with a gang rival in a dark warehouse. So they carry special weapons, these Black Stars, bottles caps soldered to brass knuckles, and they use them, brandished politely if possible, applied viciously if necessary. Their enemies are marked by sliced flesh, lacerated cheeks through which sometimes teeth and even tongue are visible.
Lee twirls the metal around his hand as they walk, letting the spikes glitter in the light.
Tonight his men unload another shipment, nails squealing as crates are jacked open. Lee inspects the contents as several others test the product. Together they lean against a railing as he watches, his hip, his elbow, his knee to hers. Jay feels the rub of corduroy press into her skin, the sinuous outline of the knuckles in his pocket. The edge of his hand brushes hers, the bent line of his broken pinky warm on her cool skin as he weaves their fingers together.
The men's eyes are dark and wide as they hold out their pipes in the haze.
Perhaps at one time she would have tried one, but now she shakes her head and they go out into the street where they breathe.
"All drugs are dangerous," Lee says as the sun rolls over the edge of the world.
He pulls her towards him.
"Some are worth it," he continues, bringing his lips to hers once and then again, "And some aren't."
She swirls in his arms as they leave.
Love is the most addictive drug of all.
As the leaders of the world begin to meet at Versailles to dictate the peace in January 1919, something changes in Sydney. She can't say what it was, even now. The market shifts, scrabbles and then suffers. The trade changes subtly. The customers grow younger, and so do the runners. Everyone she knew from when she began is gone. Only she is left; perhaps by chance, perhaps by grace.
Furrows grow in Lee's brow.
"How old are you?" he asks one night.
"Almost seventeen."
"The girl that died yesterday was only fifteen."
The one before was two years younger, and she, someone who has lived hundreds of days more than that, suddenly feels old by comparison. Five have died in the last three weeks, two by overdose, three in prison cells.
"What do we do?" he asks into the darkness.
She knows he isn't expecting an answer, but she has one anyway, the only one she has ever known.
"Fight back."
He pulls her against him and holds her there.
"You're so different," he says in wonder. "Nothing scares you, not even life."
So she isn't scared when he wakes her in the dark one night.
"Come with me," he orders and of course she does.
They wind through the maze of the docks until he stops outside a warehouse she doesn't recognize.
"Take these," he orders, slipping the metal knuckles into her pocket. He pulls out a revolver, releasing the cylinder and checking the rounds within. He snaps the cylinder back into place and tucks the gun into the waistband of his trousers.
Wordlessly she follows him into the darkness, sliding her fingers into the cold metal of his knuckles.
Three police officers are waiting as they step into the light. Lee greets them, and she realizes belatedly that they too are part of the Stars, the ones that look the other way when dark boats come to the docks, who overlook certain buildings on raids, who pocket extra cash at the end of every month.
"We have to stop this," Lee begins. "It's wrong. They're only children."
The older cop, the one standing in the center, laughs, a harsh dry sound that makes her twitch as he steps forward.
"And you're only in my way."
It happens so fast she hardly realizes it. She sees Lee reach for his gun the same time that the cop on the left goes for her, slamming her backwards against the wall so that her head ricochets against the brick. Teeth crunch into her tongue and blood floods her mouth; she chokes, panics and tries to spit it out. The world wavers, turning sideways and fuzzy, as Lee fires at the cop on the right. Only then does the older cop raises his revolver, aiming at Lee even as she tries to scream. The sound echoes – it will stay with her for the rest of her life – as she watches him fall.
The younger cop drags her upwards, pinning her.
"Get rid of her," the man orders as he kicks Lee's body.
She doesn't even think but slams her fist forward, towards his jaw, but he sees her coming and ducks. It is too late. The sharpened teeth sink deep into the curve of his throat and he screams, the sound burbling from his chest. She's never sure if she intended it, but she rips sideways as he falls, the metal teeth slicing through skin and flesh and vein. For a moment he stands there, pressing a hand to his neck. Then suddenly blood gushes out, pulsing outward in great arterial spurts that slosh over her.
He turns his tortured face to her and she runs.
The dark policeman looks up too late, rising only as she reaches the door. Yet he moves fast and as she slides around the corner, she feels the bite of his own sharpened knuckles as they descend like a terrible talon, ripping through her shirt and carving deep ruts in her skin of her back.
But then she is through, running out, running away, running until she can no longer run any more.
She wakes up days later, restrained in a dim hospital ward, her wrists chained to the bed, charged with murder. Fight back, she'd told Lee, but it is the word of the police against her own and who can fight that?
Jessa stops there and Jack waits in her silence.
In the café Hilda is whistling as she dries plates with a white cloth. One slips; the shatter reverberates but the blonde doesn't even flinch.
Hilda sweeps up the pieces, edges screeching against the tiled floor as Jessa rises.
Jack feels her distance like an open wound.
This woman's broken pieces, so beautiful concealed, so artfully hidden, are far more jagged than shattered porcelain. She has become a master at hiding them, at pushing them deeper into herself, deeper to her bruised and bleeding heart, so that no one looking at her might even guess at her rough and ragged past. Can we ever be put together again, Jack wonders and then thinks, what faith, what absolute faith, she must have that he of all people can be.
Later he will pull strings (what few he has left) to have her juvenile report sent to Melbourne. The young girl that stares up at him from the grainy picture is so different than the woman he now knows, so different and yet exactly the same.
Jessa's mug shot is the opposite of Phryne's. Jack remembers in frustration booking Phryne Fisher on trumped-up charges after the murder at the Green Mill, coming through on his threats for her intervention, watching as she hammed it up for the camera. Her mirth couldn't be more different than Jessa, young and pale and blazing with unconcealed defiance, dark blood no longer visible on her hands as she holds her number, but there nonetheless.
It's a terrible toll, he knows, to kill someone. It's not something he's sure Phryne ever really understood, swishing around her little golden gun. Shooting someone lacks the punch of killing up close. Whether a slit throat or a bayonet to the gut, it is war all the same, violence brought home and made personal, not distant. You feel the blood on your hands, and you always will.
/ - / - / - / - /
It's a week before Jessa comes back, but she does and she is not alone.
A wizened man with a bulging tool kit and cap the color of mushy peas bounds up beside her. He comes only to her shoulder, but he has the solid air of a carpenter, of someone who can fix things, who can even make them anew, stained hands and smell of wood grained into his skin. He must be seventy if he's a day, but his toothless grin pretends he isn't a lad over twenty.
"This is trouble?" he asks her.
"No, this is Alfred James."
"Alfie," the man says, doffing his cap, and shaking Jack's hand vigorously.
"This is the man who is going to make you some bookshelves."
She'd asked him about that, he remembers, asked him if he liked books. He'd said no, he liked words, one which led to another, by force or magic. She answered she liked the same thing.
Jessa smiles as she brushes by him, directing Alfie inside. He feels the currents of air as she passes, feels as if he could reach out and put his fingers to the scent of her as if to hold her there against him.
After a single glance Alfie explains exactly what needs to be done, how to reshape his rooms, his walls, so his books can live there instead in shaky stacks on the floor. Jack agrees to everything the man says, if only so Jessa will turn her face again, to smile just for him.
"You don't remember, do you?" she asks as they walk, leaving Alfie whistling "Waltzing Matilda" behind them, happily ensconced with measuring tape and leveling tool.
"Remember what?"
"You saved him," she says, "Alfie."
"I did?" Jack questions in surprise.
"Yes," she replies. "He was charged with a bank robbery in 1926, but you found him innocent of the charge. You believed in him when no one else did."
She looks over at him.
"You saved him."
"And you?" Jack asks. "Who saved you?"
/ - / - / - / - /
"I was seventeen years-old and wanted to die."
Jessa's words are calm, but Jack feels the raggedness behind them. She stirs sugar into her tea in measured figure eights, the spoon never hitting the edges of the porcelain cup.
"At least, I didn't want to live," she continues. "Didn't think I could."
God, Jack thinks, he knows that feeling well enough.
A waiter sets down his coffee and a passionfruit pavlova for Jessa. A storm blew through the night, leaving sunny skies that make the sugar sparkle.
"And then he came."
The meringue cracks under her spoon.
Will Baker, reporter for the Canberra Chronicle, appeared in her hospital room, vivid and bright despite his dark hair and olive skin. She was on suicide watch, having threatened a nurse with a needle and attempted to cut her own wrists with a fork.
"Talk to me," he'd said, and somehow she found her voice. He was the first person to ask; he was the only one who'd cared. Once started she couldn't stop talking and he didn't stop writing. The pages of the Chronicle are filled with her words.
"I never knew that a story could change the world."
She takes a breath.
"It changed mine."
To be saved, Jack knows, is a miraculous experience.
In the end, the words do matter. The police are investigated, two other smuggling rings broken, but the cop who killed Lee is gone. Jay Tayler is not charged as an adult, but given a year of juvenile detention back in Canberra. She goes to bed each night convinced she will die; she wakes up each morning surprised. So she bares her teeth, she throws her elbows, she survives.
She is released on a rainy day in July 1921.
The sum total of her worldly possessions consists of three set of smalls, two socks, a pair of men's field boots, and a cotton dress with an uneven hemline. She does not own an umbrella, so rain splatters down on her bare head, her newly long hair, as she walks out.
She has no idea where she's going, but there is a car waiting on the other side of the wire and she goes to it out of curiosity rather than expectation.
The window rolls down and Will Baker's face appears.
"Get in," he says cheerfully, and she does.
He hires her for a year's work experience at the Chronicle. She follows Will where he goes; she learns what he does. She begins to see the world through the eyes of others. She learns how to describe things simply; she learns how to explain the unexplainable.
Slowly but surely her life is turned around. She starts writing about crime instead of living it. She becomes a survivor, not a victim.
By nineteen she is a Junior Correspondent to his Senior Reporter. Will is striking and charismatic, and she falls in love with him, as do most women, as a matter of course. When she kisses him on assignment, he does not turn her away; when he invites her to his bed, she does not refuse.
She begins to imagine a life in front of her, instead of one behind her. But her vision is cruelly shattered when Will takes a position as Far East Correspondent for the London Times in Hongkong. He does not tell her; he does not ask her to go. One day he is simply gone.
Jack hears the outrage still in her voice, the fury of someone in despair of a world so carefully created left in tatters and ruins.
"It wasn't – easy," Jessa says at last. "But I didn't die."
She exhales.
"I stayed and I survived."
The world has tried to swallow this woman whole, and she made it spit her out again. Jack imagines if anyone had a right to remain bitter and unreformed, it would be Jay Tayler. And yet somehow she found that there was something that could do more damage than weapons, something that could heal more deeply than medicine.
Somehow she found words.
By the time she turns twenty she has become the assistant editor at the Canberra Chronicle, the same year a war-changed Jack Robinson faced the 1923 police strike in Melbourne.
By twenty-six, Jay Tayler has become a reporter with the Sydney Herald; that year, 1928, a dark-haired woman returns to Melbourne to prosecute her sister's killer.
That year Jack Robinson meets Phryne Fisher.
/ - / - / - / - /
Somehow people begin piling up at his door.
Alfie brings Sid Robertson, a plumber. Sid recruits Walter and Joseph, painters. Then comes Max Cooper, the roofer, who brings his son and nephew. Sid asks Harry Hunter to look after the wiring and the lights. Alfie brings Benjie Mason to help with the kitchen cabinets, and instructs his son-in-law to sand and refinish a bed, two bureaus, and a lovely driftwood table that Jack has somehow acquired.
Now those he has saved begin to save him.
All of these people – so carefully researched and located by Jessa, so generous and enthusiastic with their labor – have somehow been affected by him, by what he's done. He saved Alfie from unwarranted charges of theft, found the man who kidnapped Sid's daughter (safely returned), prosecuted the union boss who harassed Walter and Joseph. Benjie remembers his kindness when his mother's brother was booked on assault, Max the relief (if not peace) when his father's murderer was caught in 1929.
Perhaps, Jack begins to believe, he has done some good in this world.
He sees Jessa almost every day now, and when they walk to lunch, he uses only a sturdy cane. They laugh and talk about books and films, about nothing that matters and everything important, until they return to his home, hazy with wood dust and electric with the smell of drying varnish. They linger on the porch until she says good-night.
Jack doesn't realize how much he wants her to stay until he watches her walk away.
On the weekends, his house becomes a revolving hive of activity. Jessa calls in the reserves – Hugh and Dottie – to help supervise. Hugh takes the interior, Jessa the exterior, and Dottie colonizes the kitchen to help feed the army of help that continually shows up every morning, punctually and cheerfully.
Jack helps where he can, sanding, painting, holding, fetching. He understands now, a little, the relief of these men, not just financially, but in being useful again, in being needed.
He helps Jessa in the yard, pruning and clearing brush, not just because he likes gardening but because he likes being close to her. He forgets he needs the cane; or rather, he finds he doesn't need it after all. They excavate his porch from the profusion of wattle and bottlebrush, limiting the enthusiasm of the trumpet creeper with vengeful cutting. In a far corner they find an old fig tree blooming happily; Jessa picks off two of the dark fruit and they stand in the sun to suck out the sweet flesh. Later they discover a family of fruit bats under his eaves, crashing into each other when the first inhabitants scuttle out in a mad rush of dark wings; he holds on to her well after they have disappeared into the sky.
As they settle back onto their own feet, she points to the edge of the house where a silvery cobweb glints in the sunshine. She reaches out and touches the sticky corner with her finger. Ripples run throughout the silken strands but still the black spider at its center does not move.
She isn't afraid, Jack thinks, she truly isn't. Phryne would have been; she would have run away screaming, she would have been in his arms.
He thinks maybe this strange and beautiful woman might yet be.
He hopes.
"Sometimes we can't be afraid," Jessa says without looking at him, "Of things bigger than ourselves."
She pulls her finger against the web, letting it tremble without her touch.
(He does too.)
Only now does she look over, her eyes steady on his.
"Don't you think?"
They have been born in different centuries, he and this woman. They have seen different things. And yet somehow they see eye to eye.
He feels her now, like he's never felt anyone else. It's an awareness, a heightened alertness. He feels her just before she turns the corner of Vautier Street and he sees her coming towards him; his stomach tightens when she sits next to him, crosses her legs, and the cap of her knee flips in the light.
He feels her and he hasn't even touched her.
Jack lets himself go to her now, spun out of his own web. Her hands come to his face and he is held between the very fingers that have written so much about him, that he thinks still have so much more yet to write. She's right here, right in front of him, and all he wants is to kiss her and all he's thinking is why he didn't do this before.
"Jay!" They both jump, a little, as Dottie calls. "Jay, where are you?"
"Here," she answers softly, her eyes still on his, "Where I've always been."
Then she calls back to Dottie and Jack watches her go, feeling the loss.
Now, as the darkness drapes down on them like crepe, she comes to the porch and sits on the swing beside him. Her twill cavalry pants and low boots are brushed with dirt; she smells like nectar, sweat, and the pungent break of greenery. Her hair has swung loose, curling in the humidity, and when she wipes sweat from her face with the back of her hand, she leaves a brown smudge there like a mark of coup.
He hands her a Melbourne Bitter and she taps his bottle with her own.
Breathing, Jack realizes she's done the impossible. She's brought him back to life.
The knots of his heart have come undone, the hollowness under his ribs filled. The future is no longer foreboding, but bright like flowers unfolding, alive and vibrant, something that will bloom.
He sets down his bottle and rises – carefully now since he has stopped using the cane. He descends the steps one by one without using the railing and stops at the bottom, taking the shovel leaning against the porch and digging two small holes on either side.
Jessa stands above him, watching.
He takes out a tiny packet from his pocket and divides the seeds evenly, covering them and tamping the earth tightly over top.
"What are they?" she asks.
"You'll see," he answers.
/ - / - / - / - /
They grow slowly at first, these tiny seedlings. Their tendrils are tentative and delicate, the palest of greens. Then the vines reach the steps, curl themselves to the porch frame, and thrive.
/ - / - / - / - /
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