Jellicoe Road (19 page)

We stand by the fountain on Darlinghurst Road and for a moment I get a glimpse of who I was back then. Tagging along behind my mother on these streets, our feet dirty, but our dresses so pretty. I wore a white one, once, someone’s old communion dress that we had found in an op-shop and I thought I was a princess. Suddenly, for one incredible moment, I remember something. That my mother smiled at me in wonder that day and said, “Look at my beautiful girl.”

He had been away from the Jellicoe Road for a year and, when he finished his final exams, he came
back because he had promised Narnie he would. Along the way he saw their ghosts—planting the poppies, waiting for him at the general store, planning their tunnel, grieving for their dead. But living in the heart of Narnie was the only home he had ever had. Deep down he knew he wasn’t enough to keep Narnie alive for the rest of her life. But he could try.

“Promise me…” he said to her at her door, his heart aching when he saw Webb’s soul in her eyes. But then he stopped himself. No promises about death or keeping alive. That had been Tate’s job when Narnie seemed so fragile over the years. It sounded weak coming from him.

“Promise me that you’ll never go looking for Tate. Whatever you do, don’t go looking for Tate.”

“Promise me that you’ll never ask me that again,” she’d replied, her voice strong and clear.

He shook his head. “She’s not Tate anymore, Narnie. She’s someone else and that baby…”

“Promise me that one day we’ll bring them back here, Jude.”

He could tell her now what she’d find, because he had gone looking himself. In the city, the Tate they knew was gone. Lost to them. Lost to herself. But
Narnie stared deep inside him and he remembered what brought him to this place now. This girl, standing on the side of the Jellicoe Road like an apparition, promising him a richer life than he ever dreamed of. And he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t hold it back until they were in her room, tugging at each other’s clothing, breathing each other’s breath, tasting each other’s grief.

“Promise me…promise me…” he said between gasps, bunching up her skirt, removing anything that got in their way. The need to be inside her, connected to her, made his body shudder just at the thought of it. She clutched him, her fingers digging in like she needed to gather parts of him to act as her own second skin for the rest of her life. He had never heard emotion from Narnie before and now…now it was so loud, so gut-wrenching that he wanted to cover her mouth with his hand. To hold everything within her. But Narnie had held it in for too long and her rage, or pain or grief or love, pierced his ears and he knew that, no matter what, he’d never be able to block it out. That he’d never want to.

Then when it was over, she gathered him into her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.

That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother was alive. That had been her sin.

And this was her penance.

Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead.

“Taylor Markham?”

I look up at the boy standing in front of me. One or two of his teeth are chipped and his skin looks rough with broken capillaries. It’s not acne but it looks raw and painful. He is small and wiry and his eyes have that intense wild look that I’ve seen on many of the faces at the soup kitchens and food vans. This kid, younger than me by at least two years, looks like some kind of Charles Manson copycat. I stare at him for a moment, totally at a loss because I know it’s not Simon. But then it hits me and my heart picks up a beat of excitement.

Not because he means something to me but because he is proof that I existed. He lived in the room next door to us. Him and his mum. She’d leave him with me sometimes and the rest is a blank.

He knows I can hardly remember him. He has that disgusted look on his face you get when someone forgets your name. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he says flatly.

The shock of his words makes my blood run cold and I can feel Griggs tensing up next to me. The kid is fidgety, like he’s either on something or just coming off it. I look at his arm and see the bruising from the needle marks and he catches me looking but there’s no expression on his face. He’s numb to the world.

I stare at him. How can you just forget a person completely until the moment you see his face again? Who else is back there lurking in my head?

“My mother? Have you seen her?” I ask.

“Around. But not for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“Don’t care. I’ve got to be someplace,” he says, and just like that he walks away.

I stand staring, my mind full of a thousand thoughts that I am so used to shoving into locked drawers. But this time I let those thoughts stay no matter how bad they may be.

Sam
. I don’t quite know where the name has come
from but it appears on my lips like a sob and I run after him. “Sam!” The sound of his name stops him and for a moment I see a flash of something like vulnerability.

“Go,” I say. “Wherever you have to be. But meet us later. At the McDonald’s.”

He knows which McDonald’s because we’ve been there before.

“My shout.”

We wait for hours and then he’s there. He totally ignores Griggs and sits down opposite me.

I don’t know what to say to him and I don’t really get the sense that he actually wants to talk to me but he doesn’t move.

“Do you want something to eat?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Maybe a Big Mac.”

I look at Griggs who keeps on staring at the kid like he doesn’t trust him for a moment.

“Jonah?” I say. He gives me one of those looks that say,
I’m not going anywhere,
but after a moment he reluctantly stands up.

“Would you like fries with that?” he asks Sam sarcastically.

“Large Coke.”

“Same,” I say.

We’re left alone.

“How come you thought I was dead?” I ask, staring at him the whole time, not really wanting to hear the answer.

The kid shrugs. He scratches a scab on his finger and the crust falls on the table in front of us. “Do you have cigarettes?” he asks.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“For later.”

I shake my head.

“Have you got ten dollars?”

I nod and we don’t speak for a while.

Griggs returns and sits down again. Under the table, I squeeze his hand.

“Sam’s mother worked with mine,” I tell Griggs, almost conversationally. “I used to look after him.”

Griggs nods.

“I don’t think he actually understands what you mean by ‘work,’” Sam says. “Do you, dickhead?”

“Maybe we can go outside and you can explain it to me,” Griggs says to him quietly.

Not now, Griggs, I want to say. I can tell it is
going to kill him to keep his mouth shut.

Sam concentrates on the food and wolfs it down almost in three mouthfuls. I take small bites of mine.

“I need to find her, Sam,” I say when he seems to be finished. “It’s really important. Maybe your mum will know.”

“Eve? She’s a fruitcake. It’s like everything’s fried up there, do you know what I mean? Every time I ring her it’s like, ‘Sam, can you lend me twenty dollars?’” He puts on a whining voice. “‘Can you buy me a case of beer? Can you buy me some ciggies?’” He looks at me intensely. As if a thought has just occurred to him. “And she never pays me back. She’s a waste of space and she keeps on having these fucking kids.”

I remember Eve now. She lived totally for the guy she was with and Sam was the number twelve priority in her life. Sam was a pathetic kid, so tiny and needy. His nose was continually running and he was always getting bashed up by older kids in the area. The one thing about my mother was that she never formed emotional attachments to men, so I never had to suffer the consequences of her relation
ships. Sometimes when we were walking along, I’d see her looking in the distance as if she was searching for someone. I think now that she believed that Webb could have been out here and it’s what kept her around this place for so long.

“Do you remember the last time you saw me?” he asks.

I don’t answer and he continues. “Eve had left us at home with Les, that arsehole she was going out with.”

I shudder and I sense Griggs looking at me.

“The cops got him, you know. Part of the kid porn thing a couple of months ago. Remember your mum came after her shift and went berserk and she was belting Les with everything she could find and she was screaming, ‘What the fuck have you done to them?’”

I shake my head. But I do remember now and I know it’s the story I told Raffy that she’ll never forget. The one she wouldn’t let me remember.

“And we were just standing there in our knickers crying because we didn’t get why she was going apeshit and she grabbed you and dragged you out of there and Eve was shouting at her and calling her a
crazy bitch and the neighbours went nuts.”

“Whose mother was the bigger fruitcake? Yours or mine?”

Next to me I sense the change in Griggs’s breathing.

“And I never saw you again. Two days later she came back without you. She was so off her face. Eve asked, ‘Where’s the kid?’ and your mum said, ‘She’s in heaven,’ and she just killed herself laughing for ages. Fuck, I cried for a week, you know.”

I’m staring at him with my mouth open. “Why would my mother say something like that?”

Sam doesn’t respond to questions and doesn’t wait for answers. He just speaks and I can’t even block him out because it takes too much effort.

“You had a Spiderman outfit,” he continues.

“Saving the neighbourhood from evil,” I say weakly, remembering my line.

He stands up. “Got to be somewhere,” he says. “You said you had money.”

I look at Griggs, pleadingly, but Griggs is staring at me like he’s been hit by a truck.

I glance back at Sam and there’s a look on his face. Like he hates me. “You’re angry with me,” I say as he
begins to walk away.

“Let him go,” Griggs says quietly.

But I can’t. I jump out of the booth and go after him. “I didn’t ask her to take me out to a Seven-Eleven six hundred kilometres from here and leave me there, Sam. At least your mother didn’t do that to you,” I say angrily. Griggs tries to pull me away.

“Mine went to Canberra for two weeks,” Sam says, looking at me with massive cold eyes. “But she didn’t leave me there. She left me with Les.”

I stare at him. Griggs is standing next to me, rubbing his eyes, like he’d love to just disappear. After a couple of minutes I take some of Santangelo’s money from Griggs and stuff it into Sam’s hand. Our fingers touch for a moment.

“You didn’t even know who I was,” he says. “I knew you straightaway.” And that little hurt boy is back and I let myself remember things that I’ve been blocking for years.

“What do you want me to remember, Sam? That I taught you to read? And we read the first Harry Potter book and when I finished you said…you said…” I can hardly speak because I’m crying again.

“I said, ‘I wish I was a wizard,’” he whispers.

We stare at each other for a moment and he pockets the money.

“Do you know where Oxford Street is?” he asks after a moment.

I look at Griggs and he nods.

“Meet me there tonight at about ten thirty. At the lights outside the Court House Hotel.”

I nod again.

“I’ll find out what I can from Eve.”

Griggs and I walk in total silence. We’re in a laneway where rubbish is strewn and bins are overflowing. Suddenly he kicks one of the bins with full force and it goes flying. I stand and watch him. His back is to me. I walk up and put my arms around him, leaning against him.

I feel his heart thumping hard and his hands take mine and they are shaking.

“You okay now?” I ask him after a while.

He doesn’t say anything, but just turns around and holds me.

“Jonah, regardless of what happened, I’ve spent the last six years living in…”

I think for a moment and a little touch of hope makes itself felt.

“What?” he asks.

“I was going to say, ‘I’ve spent the last six years living in paradise.’ Do you get it? It’s like heaven. That’s what she meant.”

“Except the kid thought you were dead.”

“She took me out there and rang up Hannah because if there was one place Tate loved, it was Jellicoe and she knew it would be the safest place for me.”

“And when she came back, the kid said she was absolutely off her face because you were gone from her life,” he said.

I’m looking at him in wonder. “I never thought she loved me, you know.”

It’s a quarter to eleven before Sam shows. He has that edgy look about him, unable to keep still, his eyes like a crazed rabbit about to be caught.

“She’s in a hos—hospice? Up the road. St. Vincent’s.”

“Hospital,” I correct.

“Whatever.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

He shrugs. He looks around, edging away, but I catch a glimpse of some need in his eyes. Like he hasn’t given up completely.

Griggs takes my hand and pulls me away, but I don’t want to let go.

“Sam!” I call out and he turns around. “I live on the Jellicoe Road. Where trees make canopies overhead and where you can sit at the top of them and see forever. My aunt built me a house there. Remember that.”

He’s staring at me but it’s better than him walking away.

“Promise me you’ll remember,” I say forcefully.

He nods and we walk away but like Lot’s wife I turn back. He’s talking to this middle-aged guy who has his hand on his shoulder. The next minute they both get into a taxi and then they’re gone.

“Let’s go,” Griggs says quietly.

At the hostel we get our own room. It’s tiny with double bunks but we climb into the same bed and Griggs holds on to me like he’s never going to let go.

“Do you want to know why I called my school
that time?” he asks in the dark.

“You don’t have to explain.”

“No, I want to. I had this dream. That someone—actually it was my father—spoke to me and he said, ‘Jonah, if you go any farther, you will never come back,’ and although I’ve been told a million times during counselling that I don’t need his forgiveness, I just thought it was the closest thing to it. That maybe he was protecting me from something out there and that the warning was his way of saying that he forgave me. Then I thought, if I’m not coming back, then you probably won’t be either so I called the school and next thing the Brigadier and Santangelo’s dad turn up.”

He sounds so sad that it breaks my heart.

“But now that we’re out here, as bad as everything seems, I don’t think my life or yours was at risk. So I must have imagined it all. There was no message. There was no forgiveness. Nothing.”

“You don’t know that. We were younger then, Jonah. Maybe something would have happened to us if we had reached the city. And, as Jessa would say, there is always that serial killer. Maybe your dad was warning you because he cared.”

He shakes his head and, although it’s dark, I can tell he’s crying.

“What are you thinking?” I whisper after a while.

“That you deserve romance,” he says.

I trace his face with my fingers. “Let me see. A guy tells me that he would have thrown himself in front of a train if it wasn’t for me and then drives seven hours straight, without whingeing once, on a wild-goose chase in search of my mother with absolutely no clue where to start. He is, in all probability, going to get court-martialled because of me, has put up with my moodiness all day long, and knows exactly what to order me for breakfast. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that, Jonah.”

“I’m in year eleven, Taylor. I’m not going to get court-martialled.”

“Just say you get expelled?”

“Then so be it. I still would have driven for seven hours and ordered you hot chocolate and white toast and marmalade.”

“And you don’t call that romantic? God, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

I sit up in the dark and after a moment I take off
my singlet and I hear him taking off his T-shirt and we sit there, holding each other, kissing until our mouths are aching, and then we’re pulling off the rest of our clothes and I’m under him and I feel as if I’m imprinted onto his body. Everything hurts, every single thing including the weight of him and I’m crying because it hurts and he’s telling me he’s sorry over and over again, and I figure that somewhere down the track we’ll work out the right way of doing this but I don’t want to let go, because tonight I’m not looking for anything more than being part of him. Because being part of him isn’t just anything. It’s kind of everything.