Although I’d told them both I wanted to forget Nicky Blackwell and didn’t want to talk about him any more, they kept returning to the topic. They said Nicky was a bastard who’d led me on. At first I’d nodded in agreement, knowing it wasn’t really true, and then I didn’t even bother with that.
Sonia wanted to know the name of the slag that he was going round with. I described the girl I’d seen the time we’d both been given detention and said that I thought she was also a senior, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘She may be a year younger than us – or even a year older than him.’
‘Well that narrows it down considerably.’ Sonia rolled her eyes.
‘Maybe it wasn’t even her,’ I added. ‘It could be someone outside school. What does it matter anyway?’
‘Because we should find out about her,’ Sonia insisted. ‘Know your enemy.’
‘She’s not my enemy.’
‘Well, she should be.’
I wondered why I’d bothered. And then seeing that she’d upset me, Sonia stopped. ‘We’re your friends.’ She looked directly at me, wanting me to understand. ‘Lately you’ve been acting like we’re against each other, and we’re not.’
Cassie put her lunch on the grass and moved out into the sun so that she was facing me. ‘We miss hanging out with you,’ she added.
Over the last few days, I had seen less of them than I normally would have done. I had gone straight home after school. I had even spent one lunchtime in the library. I looked at them, and I wanted to explain that it wasn’t just them. I had felt like an idiot about Nicky and had wanted to hide away. I also wanted to tell them about seeing Daniel the previous night, and how upsetting that was. But I didn’t. What had happened with Nicky and with Daniel felt private and I was reluctant to talk about either. Lately it had seemed there was enough gossip and rumour flying around and I didn’t want to add any more words to the fire.
Across the oval I could see a group of fifth formers huddled together under the shade of a lone pepper tree that grew by the fence, separating the school grounds from the river. That was where Joe usually hung out. Far enough away for us not to cross paths during lunchtime. They were all there: Stevie, Joe, Kate and Cherry. All except Lyndon. As far as I was aware, he hadn’t been at school since the first detention, over a week ago.
I hadn’t spoken to Joe about whether Cherry had gone to the police but after my conversation with Daniel the previous night, I’d assumed she had. She was standing slightly apart from the boys, along with Kate, who had one arm around her shoulder and seemed to be comforting her. I wondered what was going on.
Cassie had leant in a little closer. She had something to tell us. Her large blue eyes were wide and she laughed, stopping as suddenly as she had begun as though she were uncertain how to respond to her own news.
‘Grant Benson.’
Sonia and I waited.
‘Well?’ Sonia eventually said.
Cassie twisted the leather tie on her wrist. ‘You know we walked home together yesterday afternoon? He lives in one of the flats near ours.’
I didn’t know. In my self-imposed isolation, I’d avoided walking up the hill with Cassie after school. Sonia usually had to wait for Jude, who continued to insist on picking her and Sal up from school, and although Sonia pretended to hate it, I think she was relieved.
Cassie looked around nervously. ‘Anyway, I had this joint I’d nicked from Karen.’
She was determined to get into smoking dope.
‘I offered to share it with him. You know, under the Gladesville Bridge.’
‘And?’ This time I was the one urging her to continue, wanting to make up for the fact that my remoteness had hurt her.
She looked embarrassed, a faint flush across her tan, the freckles on her cheeks darkening. She let go of her wristband and twisted her pale blonde hair around and around one of her fingers.
‘Well, he was into it. And we went down there, and sat by the pylons and smoked, and I guess we were both pretty out of it.’
Across the oval, Cherry had stopped crying and was once again sitting with the others, although Kate was still by her side, ready to comfort her.
‘Well, you know.’
‘No,’ Sonia replied.
‘We started kissing.’
Sonia looked at her as though she were mad. ‘You were kissing Grant Benson?’
Cassie nodded.
‘You’ve never even said you liked him.’ Sonia turned to me for confirmation, and I had to agree.
Grant was in our form, one of the boys who were frequently in trouble, and known for starting fights. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been by the teachers’ car park laying into some kid in the junior school. Mr Mulley had to break them up and Grant was suspended for a week.
‘So?’ Cassie was defiant now. ‘People are different when you talk to them, and you can find out that you like them fairly quickly.’
She had a point.
‘He’s had a really tough time. His mum left when he was only four and he was put in a home for a few years. She’s gone back to his dad now, but apparently he’s still a bastard.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears, and then, just as she was about to say something else, there was a shout from the other side of the oval.
I looked up quickly.
With my hand shielding my eyes from the sparkle of the sun on the river, I could see a boy being held back by Stevie and Joe. He was kicking viciously, scrambling out of their arms and making a lunge for Cherry.
‘You fucking bitch.’ The words rang out clear and shocking, and it was as though the whole school paused and listened. ‘If you knew, why’d you keep quiet for so long?’ His wail was hollow. Wounded.
This time Joe had him and I ran over, my heart a loud thumping rock within my ribs as I realised who it was he was holding.
‘Get a teacher,’ Joe called out to me, and I looked around, the oval a blur of green, the river a streak of glittering blue.
In the distance I could see Miss Ingleton and I waved to her furiously, running back across the oval as I did so.
‘It’s Daniel,’ I told her. ‘He’s gone berserk. He’s trying to get Cherry.’ I could barely breathe with the panic.
She ran with me, telling one of the other students to find the principal.
By the time we made it back to Joe there was a crowd, a ring of kids circling them. Somehow they’d managed to get Daniel down on the grass. Stevie was sitting on his chest and Joe was telling him to calm down. Daniel sobbed. Deep, heaving sobs, and I knelt close to him and told him it was okay.
‘It’ll get better,’ I promised, starting to cry myself, and he looked across at me, his dark brown eyes awash with tears.
A few feet away, Cherry stood, also crying, her shoulders hunched forward, her long hair hanging across her face.
‘Come on,’ Kate told her. ‘Let’s leave them.’
Daniel’s breathing was heavy, but slowing, and you could see the tension slide out of his body, replaced by the sagging weight of grief.
‘She should have gone to the police right away.’ He looked at me for confirmation, and I could only nod in agreement. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t.’
Mr Jackson had arrived and helped Daniel up, reaching down and taking his hand in his own.
I watched as they walked back across the oval and then I wiped at my eyes. A long strand of straw grass had wrapped around my wrist and scratched my eyelid.
‘What happened?’ I asked Joe.
He too looked shaken. ‘Cherry went to the police. Daniel found out she was the one who knew who Amanda was meeting. He wanted to know why she hadn’t gone sooner.’
‘Why didn’t she?’
‘I don’t know.’ Joe looked worn out. ‘Maybe she didn’t want to think that it was possible.’
‘That what was possible?’
But we were interrupted. Mr Castle was right behind us, his voice booming as he ordered everyone to break it up. He placed one large hand on
Joe’s shoulder and the other on Stevie’s. ‘You two.’ His commands were always barks, harsh, like the cracking of boulders. ‘With me. Now.’
I stood there for a moment, barely aware of everyone slowly dispersing, their voices a low mutter as they left the scene with occasional backward glances. At my feet, the grass was scuffed up, revealing dry river dirt. There was a small square of fabric, a corner from a school shirt, and a banana peel, left over from someone’s lunch.
Cassie and Sonia were standing under the awning and waiting for me to walk towards them. Behind me I heard the flap of a sail, the gentle beat of canvas against the clear blue sky, as a boat slowly tacked its way down the river towards the bridge.
‘What happened?’ they asked when I reached them, and I told them the little I knew.
‘He’s right.’ Cassie declared. ‘She should have told the police right away.’ And then she looked satisfied. ‘Seems it’s all just the way I said it was. I reckon I should be a cop.’
Again, I had to remind her that we didn’t even know that Lyndon was the one Amanda had been meeting.
She ignored me. ‘Detective Cassie O’Donnell.’
‘With a drug habit.’
She looked sheepish.
We sat again, and I could see they wanted to continue with the conversation we’d been having only moments before. It was Grant Benson we were dissecting and I had to turn my thoughts away from Daniel lying on the ground and back to Cassie’s story.
‘Do you like him?’ I asked her.
She looked uncertain. ‘I didn’t, but then that afternoon, I did. He was different.’
There was a hesitancy in her reply that made me think there was something she wasn’t telling us. Cassie usually made an immediate leap to a particular side of the fence, declaring her thoughts without thinking.
She stood up and tugged at the hem of her uniform.
‘We kind of went a long way very fast.’
Sonia looked up at her, eyes shaded against the glare. ‘You did more than just kiss?’
Cassie nodded, and then when she saw Sonia about to speak again, she interrupted her. ‘I don’t know, we were out of it and it felt good and I liked him. We didn’t have sex but he wanted to, and there was a moment when I could have and it just all feels so strange now–’
I didn’t realise she was crying at first. Nor did Sonia. But as she wiped at her eyes with the collar of her tunic and sniffed loudly, I held my hand up for her and pulled her down to sit with us.
‘You don’t even know him,’ I told her gently.
She nodded.
Sonia put her arm around her. ‘Have you spoken to him since?’
Cassie shook her head. ‘I saw him this morning, when I got to school.’ She took a deep breath, not wanting to cry any more. ‘I said hello.’
We waited for her to continue.
‘He kind of glanced at me and then kept on walking.’
I looked at her in dismay.
‘But you know, he probably just wants to be tough in front of his friends.’ She smiled now, a quick, sharp, determined smile. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
The bell rang, jangling and harsh across the oval. Everyone was picking up their lunch scraps, and standing slowly, reluctant to head back to the heat of a long afternoon in the classroom. I wondered how Daniel was.
Cassie looked at both of us. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ She made us swear.
Sonia then made her make a promise: ‘Ignore him.’
Cassie’s eyes were wide as she nodded and I knew she had no intention of doing as Sonia advised.
‘If he can’t even say hello to you the next day, you shouldn’t be bothering with him.’
We walked across the oval, Cassie in the middle, and I linked my arm in hers. I had known her since I was in kindergarten. I had slept over at her house and hung out by the waterfront, we had gone to the movies together, we had told each other secrets, and we had, at times, irritated each other. I imagined her under the Gladesville Bridge with Grant Benson, and I wished she’d listen to Sonia because I didn’t like to think of her hoping for something that was never going to be worth it.
seventeen
Fact: The police are looking for Lyndon.
Two constables came to our school that afternoon, doing the rounds of each of the home rooms. We were sent to ours twenty minutes before the bell was rung for the end of the day. Miss Ingleton was standing at the front, her rollcall book open on the desk in front of her. She ran her finger down each of the names, checking us off when she saw us, calling out if the person wasn’t immediately visible. Daniel wasn’t there, but she didn’t say his name. She would have known he’d been sent home, and when I thought of him in that huge house, with Roxie drunk in the lounge room and Amanda’s bedroom untouched, I wished I could do or say something to change the way it was for him.
‘It’s one of the hardest things in life,’ Dee had told me, ‘learning that often we can’t do much and the difference we can make, if any, is usually very small. But the fact that you listened to him and that you tried to offer help isn’t completely meaningless. I’m sure it would have given him some solace – even if it was simply to let him know that people do care.’
I hadn’t been so sure. But that lunchtime, when I’d seen him lying on the ground and sobbing, I knew that the fact I’d been to his place made it easier for him to tell me why he’d been so angry with Cherry. It wasn’t much but it was more than nothing.
I took my seat, and began to pack my books into my bag, while Miss Ingleton finished marking off our names.
Everyone was talking, wanting to know why we’d been called back, the words spinning around the room in a blur of unfocused chatter. In the back row, Dennis White threw a tennis ball up and down, catching it with a soft thwack. The last throw went too high, hitting the low stucco ceiling and bouncing back down onto his head.
‘Jeez.’ He leapt up, his chair clattering to the ground behind him.
Everyone laughed. Someone called him an idiot. Miss Ingleton clapped her hands, and then, when there was no response, she took out her playground whistle and blew it, shrilly, into the room.
The silence was immediate.
‘I need you all to cooperate,’ she said, as there was a knock on the door. ‘We have a special announcement, and I want you all to listen.’
The afternoon sun was white, a shaft of hazy light, as she stepped back to let in the two policemen. They were at least a foot taller than her, one had his cap on and the other held his in his hand. Each was in full uniform, the steel-blue shirts, the navy gaberdine trousers, the polished black shoes and the glint of the badges on their chests made them both look indistinguishable from each other. I looked at each of their faces in turn, both stern, and I wondered what it would be like to be in the force and to have to deal with people who were bashed and died and stole and lied and cheated and ran, and I knew it was a job I would never want.
The one with his cap on stepped forward to talk to us. He was Constable Conroy, Miss Ingleton told us, and he was one of the officers investigating the very tragic death of Amanda Clarke.
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