Taking Tom Murray Home
Page 22
So Mum took a part-time job at Farmers First, talking to politicians and helping organise demonstrations, and we moved into a little flat in Fitzroy and the Garretts come to visit now and then and Coach Don has been up twice and we went back to Yardley once because Mr Garrett got a new horse and everyone from the funeral procession went around to see it. But it’s strange going home when your home isn’t there any more, so I don’t want to do that again. But I miss my soccer team.
I don’t know what happened to moving interstate. I asked Mum if that’s happening, if that’s what we’re doing when Jen gets out, and she said you say things out loud sometimes that you should just keep in your head because suddenly it’s a thing and if you don’t go through with it right away everyone is asking why. Like, hasn’t she got enough to do these days without thinking about that? So who knows.
Karsi is the one from down there we see the most. Well, he’s not from down there any more because he got transferred from Portland to South Melbourne. Mum said it’s because he got in trouble for helping us, although it was nothing they could sack him for. He takes me to the footy whenever the Cats are playing and once he took me to Kardinia Park and we saw them there and Mum came too. Every Sunday they go for Chinese, never the same one twice. He makes Mum laugh which is good because if he’s not around she does a lot of sitting and looking at the door, like she’s waiting for someone to come in.
We’ve got a bit of money now Mum has a job. So we can afford to go to the football, and I joined a cricket club down the road. I never played in a proper club before but it turns out you can be a pretty good batsman when you’re not scared of the ball. But school was weird at first.
The first school I went to, it’s not like I grew up there, so I had to explain to people about five times a day why I wore gloves and steel-toed boots even when I was wearing shorts and I mostly sat in the library during breaks and lunch because I sprained my ankle playing handball on the bitumen playground and didn’t realise for a couple days and it turned black and yellow and Mum went mental. That’s wasn’t the worst though.
It was weird being at school without Jenny. It’s always been us and suddenly it was just me. Growing up, when some kid was being a dick to one of us, he had to take on both of us. I didn’t tell Mum how tough it was because she’d have been down there like a flash, talking to teachers and parents and making it worse. But after school I would hang with these deadly Koorie kids from another school who are Darren’s cousins and after a few months I talked Mum into letting me move schools. Being at their school is much better because just the fact I’m Darren’s mate is good enough for them.
Doing my checks on my own, that’s another annoying thing. But I’ve got Jenny’s phone while she’s inside and I found a way with a selfie stick and the camera so I can do it myself. I killed myself laughing in the bathroom the other day and Mum asked me if I was OK, but it was just because I imagined someone walking in while I was bent over with the selfie stick between my legs and the phone poked up my clacker. It’s kind of stupid, but I can do it, because it isn’t forever. Jenny will be out in a couple of years and I can keep the Sweden thing secret that long because Mum has no idea. And because Jenny says the thought of getting away, just us – it’s what keeps her going in there.
Everyone has their theory about why she did it, but when things calmed down and I asked her, she just said, ‘Because Dad would have.’ I’d almost convinced myself it was him, so maybe he would. But I don’t think that was the whole reason. Mum says people do crazy things sometimes when they’re upset and angry and hurt and that it was her fault too because she didn’t see what was happening to Jenny. Alasdair’s theory was it was the analgesia. Because when you can’t cry, how do you show the world you’re hurting? That’s what Alasdair told the court when she was being sentenced, anyway. The Sun and the Geelong Advertiser ran a crusade to get her off, but she’d done too much damage for the judge to just let her go. The police tried to say she lit the fire in Yardley too but the Turnbolts and I witnessed that she was with us all night and couldn’t have got into town and back again without us knowing. Which actually she could have, because both of them are deaf and I was asleep, but the police had to drop that one and she’d pleaded guilty to the others so they had more than enough to get her convicted.
If Jenny had been an adult, she would have got fifteen years or upward, the judge said. But as a kid, and because she said sorry, she only got three years at Malmsbury Detention Centre. Mum and I talk with her every day and we visit her twice a week. We’d go more often except petrol is expensive, even in our little yellow car. Sometimes I go on my own on weekends if Mum is busy, but it’s three hours and three trains. Alasdair tried to get her community release but that didn’t work, and we petitioned to have her moved to Parkville which is only fifteen minutes away but Malmsbury is the only one with medical officers who can take care of her when she gets hurt. She got beaten up pretty often in the start; kids testing how much she could take, but they got bored with that pretty quickly and mostly leave her alone. She makes money now, tricking the newbies into betting she can’t push a needle through her hand without crying. That kind of thing gets you big-time respect in a place like Malmsbury, so she’s doing OK. Better than I expected.
Once they let me go with her to her room, which she shares with this girl called Bernie from Nutfield who stole a car in Perth and drove it all the way to Melbourne without a licence and tried to sell it. It wasn’t the first car she stole. It doesn’t look like a prison cell with bars; it has a normal grey door with small windows in it, two beds, a desk for doing homework and a sink. They’re allowed to put stuff on the walls, so Bernie has a big poster of a red Ford Mustang which she says is the sweetest ride she ever stole. Jenny has a huge Swedish flag and she’s trying to learn Swedish phrases but it’s a crazy language. I’m glad Swedes all learn English in school.
You ask me who did the Yardley fire, my guess is Pop. I know, crazy, right? Old guy in a wheelchair? I bet the police never even considered it was him because of his legs. But I can totally see him in a balaclava, throwing petrol bombs at that bank from the window of his car. Plus, he drives that model of Hilux.
It’s six hundred and forty-two days until Jenny gets out, if she doesn’t screw up in there and gets max time off her sentence. And I looked it up; being in gaol won’t count against her for her Sweden visa, because she’s a minor and crimes don’t count if you’re a kid.
I’ve been looking online about Dorotea too, and it’s way, way up at the top of Sweden. I was showing Jenny and she said well, at least we won’t have to worry about getting too hot. There’s not many dairies; just fishing, forests, shops and internet companies and I don’t see us fishing so we decided I’ll be a teacher and she’ll start her own internet company. Or, since I can cry now, or cried once at least, I’m thinking I could also be a social worker, like Aunty. Or I might join the police.
We only talk about it on my solo visits though, because Mum still doesn’t know and we haven’t decided when to tell her. Or what to tell her – because Jen is still like, she isn’t coming, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t, if she wants to.
I get these urges to tell Mum about it. I nearly did, a couple of times. The other day she was in the little kitchen in our flat and she was making me baked beans after school, and she’d just finished talking to someone on the phone (like usual, because she is always either just finished or just about to) and she was singing a Cold Chisel song and the sun was coming through the high window over the sink and lighting her up and I nearly cracked and told her.
Nearly told Karsi once at the football too. And Pop, when we were down to see Mr Garrett’s new horse. OK, I nearly cracked maybe a dozen times. I didn’t though, because I know that if I tell Pop, then it’s like telling the whole of Yardley.
What keeps me going, helps me keep our secret, is this insane video I found on YouTube. Someone recorded it with a camera on a headband as they were cycling through this forest
in Dorotea in the snow. They have these crazy mountain bikes that have skis on the front and the back is like tank tracks instead of tyres, so you can ride them uphill in the snow and then ski down the other side. So this girl is screaming down this slope in the forest, dodging the trees on her bike and a moose walks right out in front of her and she drops the bike and she slides Right Under The Moose.
When I’m about to crack, I think of that video. Me and Jen are totally going to do that.
About Dorotea’s analgesia
Congenital insensitivity to pain, or congenital analgesia, is a real hereditary disease. It usually presents in a form even more debilitating than described here. Dorotea’s analgesia is fictional, but it is based on a form of the disease experienced by people in one particular region in Sweden known as Norbotten, where an unusually high number of people share a mutation in their DNA that leads to analgesia.
If you’d like to learn more, just go to www.pubmed.gov and search for ‘Norrbottnian congenital insensitivity to pain’.
Acknowledgements
I love a challenge and there can be few challenges more tempting to an Australian author than trying to win the HarperCollins Banjo Prize! It’s a huge opportunity to be published, but even more, a huge vote of confidence in the future of Australian writing. So my first thanks go to the management at HarperCollins Publishers Australia for creating the Banjo Prize and then putting in all the work it takes to sort through the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts and then read and judge the contenders. I saw the prize announced on a writers’ blog in about March of 2018, and entries were due at the end of May. At that point, Taking Tom Murray Home was a rough first draft that I really thought twice about entering. But I hammered away at it for two months and on midnight of the last possible day to enter, I sent it in. And it was very rough, I am the first to admit. So thanks also go to the fantastic editorial team at HarperCollins, from Catherine Milne to Nicola Robinson, freelancers Julia Stiles and Nicola Young, and not least designer Laura Thomas for her beautiful cover.
This book was born on a road trip through southwest Victoria with my family a few years ago, and at the time I wrote my journal notes, I had no idea it would turn into Taking Tom Murray Home, so I had to go back and check a lot of details before publication to be sure I got them right. In summer 2019 I re-drove the journey Dawn and the kids take from Yardley (based loosely on the town of Heywood, in Victoria) to Geelong and then up to Melbourne, speaking to locals along the way. Huge thanks for expert advice, as well as letting me spend time with her beautiful Clydesdales, goes to Kim Wood of Heartwood Horses at Bannockburn. A large part of making Taking Tom Murray Home believable was getting the character of Karsi right, and showing how the police might deal with such a crazy stunt. So I have to also thank Victoria Police, in particular media adviser Rochelle Jackson and Leading Senior Constable Leo Finnegan, for their help with a question that started with ‘OK, so tell me what you’d do; this guy burns down his own house and then . . .’
Another important part of making the book believable was imagining and describing the challenges of living with analgesia. For help in this, I’m incredibly grateful to my brother, neurologist Dr Mark Slee, and his physician wife, Dr Rose Smith, for helping ground a fictional condition in medical fact.
Few things are more valuable when you are setting out on any learning journey (and starting out as an author has been that) than a good mentor. I first started banging out ideas for manuscripts in 2013 and completed my first full-length manuscript by the end of 2015. It was an attempt at a light-hearted crime novel, so I showed it to a bloke I’d met at football and cricket matches and backyard barbeques over the years, Kelly Award-winning crime writer and musician, Dave Warner. He read it, and didn’t laugh at me. He’s given me huge encouragement, as well as tips and advice along the way, and so I owe a big thanks to Dave.
When you are wondering whether it is all worth it, you need people who believe in you, and for that I would also like to acknowledge Carl Pritzkat and Sharon Rice at the US Publishers Weekly magazine, for reading and recognising my early work, and encouraging me to keep plugging away. (If you’re interested, you can pick up ebooks of that early work free via my author page on Goodreads.com)
I was raised in the city, but my parents are from country stock and grew up in the mid north and far north of South Australia. We spent our childhood Easters and summers on the wheat and sheep farming properties of our relatives and it ground a love of the outback into me. My parents were both avid writers and readers themselves, so huge thanks go to Denys and Teresa for giving me a love of books, writing and good Australian yarns, because without that childhood this novel would have been impossible.
The first draft of this book was written over six intense months of intercontinental travel, when it felt like I spent more time in planes and lounges than at home with my family. The final draft was written over two months of a Danish spring when I should have been out in our garden with my wife, trimming the apple trees and raking out moss, but instead I was locked in the glasshouse or up all night tapping away at the keyboard. To my wife Lise, my son Kristian and my long-suffering proofreading daughter Asta, I owe thanks for your boundless encouragement, your understanding for the many lost hours I spent on the book, and being the best cheer squad a would-be author could hope for.
Copenhagen,
June 2019.
About the Author
TIM SLEE is an Australian journalist with wanderlust. Born in Papua New Guinea to Australian parents who sprang from sheep country in the Mid-North and Far North of South Australia, he worked for several years for the Stock Journal in Adelaide before moving to Canberra and then Sydney, where he worked for the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department. Since then he has lived in Denmark, Canada and Australia, and is currently in Denmark again, on contract with a multinational pharmaceutical company. Although, according to his favourite airline, he has been around the world with them twenty-two times and visited fifty-four countries, Australia is still his physical and emotional home base.
‘Taking Tom Murray Home is a novel that sneaks up on you, and takes you by surprise – and before you know it, you’re deep in its world and don’t want to leave. This is a thought-provoking, feel-good novel like no other, and I’m just thrilled that it is our inaugural Banjo Prize winner.’ Catherine Milne, Head of Fiction
‘Taking Tom Murray Home is a charming, quirky, clever and extremely timely novel – I just loved it!’ Alice Wood, Fiction Campaign Manager
‘This is an absolute delight to read, and a great Australian uplit novel. And somehow it combines bush poetry recitals with Facebook social media campaigns. Genius.’ Thomas Wilson, Divisional Sales Manager (Fiction)
‘At its core, this is a story of grief – and of protest. Common sense would suggest it shouldn’t be funny or uplifting, and yet it is. It is rousing and hopeful and deeply down to earth, like the Australians it so keenly and sensitively portrays.’ Nicola Robinson, Senior Editor
‘Could not put it down. It is a funny, moving, bittersweet Australian story. In parts it made you laugh and cry, but what a climax at the end.’ Doug Armstrong, Mailroom Supervisor
‘It’s a timely story, with characters so endearing you will become their biggest cheerleaders on their incredible journey. Destined to be an Australian classic.’ Sarah Barrett, Fiction Campaign Manager
‘A quirky Australian tale of unlikely situations and drought-dry humour, Taking Tom Murray Home is touching, bittersweet, and very, very Australian.’ Shannon Kelly, Editor
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2019
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Tim Slee 2019
The right of Tim Slee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
HarperCollinsPublishers
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale 0632, Auckland, New Zealand
A 75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India
1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, United Kingdom
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower, 22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA
ISBN 978 1 4607 5786 4 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4607 1153 8 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
Cover design by Laura Thomas
Cover images by shutterstock.com