‘She’s here now, Tom, you’re on speaker.’
‘Screw you both,’ Nella said.
‘Ignore the speed limit, Randall. I’ll sort any fines with the cops – they’ve passed an interim injunction.’
Jett floored it through a light that was on the red side of orange. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means’—Nella pulled her knees up to her chin, ignoring Jett’s frown at her disregard for his strict laws about riding in Bessy—‘that any of the products under question in the trial will need to cease production until the trial’s complete.’
‘So ...?’ Jett urged.
‘They’re pulling the wine!’ Tom’s disembodied voice screamed through Bessy’s speakers. ‘They’re coming to the winery at sun-up! You better get here fast, Antonella, because if we lose, it’s going to be entirely, wholly, completely your fault.’
‘They need to rename this place.’ Nella pressed her forehead against the cool glass of Bessy’s window as they passed the faded pink clam shell announcing they were one kilometre out from Bindi Bindi Cove. It had been technically morning when they’d left the city but now the sky was a socially-acceptable-to-be-awake shade of blue.
‘Why?’
‘There are no butterflies anymore. Bindi Bindi is the Noongar term for butterfly.’
‘Well, what’s the Noongar word for justfly?’ Jett asked as he swatted another enormous march fly out the window. ‘HOW are they getting in?’
‘I opened the back window. I needed fresh air but not, like, directly on my face.’
Jett stabbed the window button so viciously Nella was surprised he didn’t break his finger. Obviously his annoying calm demeanour had been an act while he dutifully played the role of bounty-hunter. And now that his bounty was securely strapped in the passenger seat, he was back to apathy, staring stonily ahead. Most of the car ride had been silent.
February was never a quiet time in Bindi Bindi. Even though most summer holiday-goers had traipsed back up the sandy highway to Perth for work and school, there was still an after-party electric buzz in the air that made Nella want to stick her Beats on so she didn’t have to hear it. Teenagers with dark tans and salt-crusted curls balanced surf and boogie boards on their bikes as they wobbled through the morning breakfast crowd in the main tourist strip. Adults were wrapped in floral dresses, activewear or board shorts, ready for a day of wine tasting, cave exploring or getting burnt on Bindi Bindi’s famous white and turquoise beaches. As Jett angled Bessy past the courthouse and police station, Nella flattened against the seat just in case anyone from work had decided to come into the office pre-opening hours to impress their absent overlord. It wasn’t like she and Jett were inconspicuous in the cherry red Porsche.
She used to love summer in Bindi Bindi, breathing in that crabby, seaweed smell and lathering herself in coconut sunscreen and sticky strawberry lip gloss. Hours stretched out by the water or climbing rocks with Eliza, her one and only friend who had passed all her challenges. Well, maybe it was a bit biased since Eliza had helped her create them. At eleven, Nella had devised her own How-to Guide for weeding out those who only wanted to be around her because she was Nella Barbarani, not because she was just Nella. She used the Swim to Survive Surf Life Saving Rules of the local club as her starting point and they grew from there. She and Eliza had laid with their bellies on the sand, crafting a list of twenty-one in sparkly neon-green pen in a fluffy journal that had come free with aTotal Girlmagazine. They’d flirt with the boys holidaying from Perth and pretend they didn’t know how to surf so they’d have an excuse to touch their slippery, hardened bodies as they begged for lessons.
Sometimes Nella’s little sister, Frankie, would tag along and Nella would try to come up with annoying tasks for her to do like she was their servant – get them Fantas from the beach kiosk, hold their bags while they peed, watch their stuff while they swam out to the floating jetty. Frankie had even helped Nella carry out some of her more convoluted challenges, doing it because it was the only way Nella would let her hang out with them. Then she developed a proper-sized pituitary gland and started making better decisions.
Until she didn’t.
Thinking about Frankie just made the echo of gunshots louder. The damp smell of her grandfather’s hidden passageway, where Nella and her siblings had been held captive on the night of the gala, seeped through the seaweed and coffee tang of the main strip.
‘Nel?’ Jett was staring, one hand casually on the steering wheel, the other tapping Bessy’s gear stick to the beat of whatever James Taylor song was playing. Jett had the musical taste of a 63-year-old retiree.
She tipped her head back, pepper, honeysuckle and leather swallowing the painful summer smells. The gunshots and screams quietened, replaced by the echo of what Jett had said back in Perth before Tom called.
That’s not why he wanted to fuck you.
It had probably been an insult, a small payback for the funeral, but she couldn’t work out what he’d meant. But the moment to interrogate it had long since passed, and she’d sound like a neurotic narcissist if she brought it up now.
‘I’m fine.’
He didn’t push it. Jett had always been like that. Sometimes she felt like a jammed door that he’d half-heartedly try to nudge open, but always gave up. Sometimes she wished someone would ram into her and knock her down.
He turned back to the road. Watching him drive was almost like watching poetry, a poem she wanted to ignore because she knew he was navigating the route back to the Barbarani Estate. Jett drove like a musician strummed a guitar, like a baseballer pitched, like a dancer leapt and twirled. The rhythms of his movements felt like balm on a bad sunburn. She’d sat and slept and thrown up in the backseat of his cars in some of the darkest moments of her life, even if he’d had no idea exactly what he was taxiing her away from.
He’d never pushed.
She wondered sometimes how much he’d actually known and how much he’d deliberately not said. Like that night when she was eighteen and he and Greyson pulled her from the clutches of her psychotic online stalker, Sally Sue. There had been many moments when Jett’s silence and his driving had patched her wounds, but she didn’t like to think about them too much. Like the summer he picked her up from her third year of uni and the conversation he’d probably forgotten. The night that kid had fallen from the balcony at a party they’d all been invited to. She had a sinking feeling she’d add this drive to that list.
Now they were back in range, Jett’s phone was exploding with notifications.
‘Is that my brother?’ Nella asked.
Jett looked down at his phone, and she clicked her tongue in disapproval. He raised his head lazily back to the road. She was fairly confident Jett could drive blindfolded and not make a single mistake, but she’d never bloody tell him that.
