We’d just slipped out of sight when a boy ran, full pelt, round the other corner and charged straight at us. He was looking over his shoulder and would send us flying like tenpins any moment.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, making him stop just in time. It was Mahmoud Rais and he was terrified.
No wonder. Close up behind Amy and me three boys had arrived, halting as Mahmoud had done, all of them with chests heaving and their bodies as tight as springs.
Mahmoud turned, ready to take off in the opposite direction, but it was too late. More kids piled around the corner. Mahmoud rushed to the back wall of the shed where he shifted his weight from one leg to the other like a boxer bouncing in the ring. Whoever came at him first was in for some serious damage.
Amy grabbed the sleeve of my shirt and stepped back as though she hoped they hadn’t seen us. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered.
‘It’s about the pig, I’ll bet. Quick, go and get the guys,’ I said and then I shuffled forwards until I was standing in front of Mahmoud.
‘What are you doing?’ she hissed at me, but after that I didn’t hear any more. A boy was shouting at me, ‘Get out of the way!’ The others fanned out into a semicircle until I couldn’t see whether Amy was still there or not.
They were all younger than me, Year Nines and Tens, and I could have named most of them if my mind hadn’t been jammed by other things. They knew me, too, if not by name then by my legs. I was the disabled kid in a Seniors’ shirt and no one wanted to be the one who knocked me flying. I was counting on that.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I barked at them.
‘He killed Charlotte,’ said the leader. I did remember his name, at least. Nathan Hattendorf. His sister was in Svenson’s class with me.
‘You don’t know that,’ I called back at him. ‘You’ve just heard rumours going round, about his family, their religion. Is that all you’ve got to go on?’
If I could get that admission out of them, maybe they’d see how stupid they were being. I waited, aware of the dangerous silence and, when a few faces frowned in confusion, I spoke up. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. If you’d only . . .’
Before I could get any further, Hattendorf set me straight. ‘Her auntie saw him,’ he growled, pointing at a girl who glared at me, implacably sure of herself.
‘The Leb was here at the school on Sunday night,’ she said.
It wasn’t just the Muslim rumour, then. My mind went blank, robbing my tongue of words – any words. I searched for Dan and Mitch and saw only that Amy had gone – saw that the mob wasn’t staying back because of me any longer, either. When they surged forwards, I groped two-handed at Hattendorf and locked my arms around him, hoping my dead weight alone might throw him off balance. In that much I succeeded when both of us fell like partners in a dance gone wrong. The impact broke my hold, but as Hattendorf scrambled to get up I caught hold of one leg like I’d seen Tyke do on the footy field. Hattendorf kicked at me with his free foot until I let go.
‘Get away from him!’ cried a voice, not a teenager’s, but the deep and furious shout of a man.
I’d put my hands over my head and had to peer through the crook of my elbow to see Ed Lambert, his face flushed from running and dark with anger. He was a technics teacher, a no-nonsense guy who soon had the hangers-on scattering and even the more determined backing away. In seconds, only Hattendorf remained and he would have scampered off, too, if Lambert hadn’t clamped a tradesman’s hand on the back of his shirt. Mahmoud stood with his back against the wall, his shirt torn and his eyes still wild and frightened. I couldn’t see any blood.
‘Are you all right, Jacob?’ said Lambert, looking down at me as I lay on my side.
‘Yeah, fine. Don’t worry about me,’ and since the teacher had his hands full taking Mahmoud off to the Admin block, he took me at my word.
Then Amy’s voice. ‘But are you? All right, I mean.’
I’d rolled over to take a longer look at Mahmoud and hadn’t seen her arrive.
‘Anything broken?’ she went on.
‘You’d hear me howling if there was.’
I sat up, collecting myself for a return to my feet – not an easy thing for me, especially when I was more shaky than I wanted to admit. The kicking had whacked me in the side of the head and, while I wasn’t seeing stars, I was in for a headache.
‘Give me your hand,’ said Amy.
‘No, I can do it.’ I didn’t want Amy to mess herself up when my hands were dusty and I’d grazed the skin of my elbow enough to draw blood.
She helped me anyway, telling me off gently as I unfolded myself to vertical. ‘What were you trying to do, Jacob? You could have got hurt. They were ready to kill the Leb kid.’
‘There wasn’t anyone else,’ I said, which pretty much told how it was.
7
hero
When was the last time I’d been in Mrs Schwartz’s office? It hadn’t changed, anyway; I recognised the paintings on the walls which were mostly copies of great masterpieces slowing fading behind the glass. The years had seeped under the door to dust their shabbiness over her desk, the bookshelves and the potted palm in the corner that was too green to be real.
We all liked Mrs Schwartz, not because she was the smiley type who tried to brighten up school assemblies with cheerful bullshit, but because she gave every waking hour to us, and we knew it. Mr Lambert was there, too. He’d gone through his version of what happened and then I’d done the same, explaining how I’d ended up on the ground. No one attacked me; they had to understand that.
Lambert nodded gravely to confirm my account and Mrs Schwartz seemed relieved that she didn’t have to browbeat the truth out of me.
‘Well, Jacob,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘I can never condone boys getting into fights, but on this occasion I have to commend you. You were trying to protect Mahmoud. You’re sure you’re okay?’
She glanced at the bandage on my elbow, but what she’d really been saying was that I was a skinny-boned cripple who’d been mad to get in the way.
‘Have you ever been in a fight before?’ she asked.
I thought of Dan and Mitch and the dickhead from the toilets and wanted to say, Yeah, I’ve been in a fight and my side won, too. I shook my head.
After a brief knock the door opened and Mum was in the room. Judging by the concern on her face, you’d think I was half-dead.
‘Are you all right, Jacob?’
Christ, how many times would I have to answer that one?
Then Mum saw the bandage and the dirt on my clothes and she was beside me, wanting a look at my elbow. ‘Where else are you hurt?’
I turned my arm away so she couldn’t take hold. ‘Mum, I’m seventeen,’ I said to her, trying not to sound rude in front of the teachers. ‘It’s no big deal.’
She backed off and seemed to understand my embarrassment, but she was fired up with mother-stuff and it had to go somewhere. She started in on Mrs Schwartz.
‘I saw a boy waiting outside with his parents, the . . .’ She paused, reluctant to describe them because of how it might sound. ‘Is he the one Jacob was fighting with?’
Mrs Schwartz looked towards the door, frowning. ‘Oh, Mahmoud . . . no. He’s the one . . . well, perhaps you should hear the whole story.’
So everything was repeated, in Mrs Schwartz’s words this time, and that was when I became a hero.
I wanted to cut in and say, You don’t know what you’re talking about. I was bloody useless, but I couldn’t backchat the Principal in front of my own mother.
‘Best take Jacob home,’ Mrs Schwartz suggested and she made for the door, holding it open as we passed through.
Outside, Mahmoud sat with a man beside him who was surely his father, bearded and black-haired and wearing the uniform of the meatworks. As soon as he saw us, the father was out of his chair and coming at me in rapid, threatening strides.
‘This is one of them, who attacked my son,’ he said sharply to Mrs Schwartz. It wa
s a question, really, but the way he said it sounded like he’d come up with his own answer.
I tugged my head down between hunched shoulders and lost my balance in the brief moments before I saw that he’d stopped short. Mum was caught out, too, and almost fell when I grabbed hold of her to keep myself upright.
Then Mahmoud was beside his father, shooting out words like a fire hose in a language I didn’t know – Arabic, I suppose. I didn’t need a translation to guess what he was saying and soon enough the father had backed off.
‘My son has explained. I’m very sorry,’ he said sincerely and, with his face reddened by embarrassment, he went back to his seat where Mahmoud bent over him, whispering still in their own language.
Mrs Schwartz was saying something to Mum – maybe she spoke to me as well, but I was watching Mahmoud, who turned to face me, as though he’d sensed my eyes on him.
Until our paths had crossed an hour ago he’d been the surly-eyed spy who watched his sister in the school yard in case she talked to guys like me. I hadn’t been entirely convinced by what Soraya told me and in the days since I’d squibbed on talking to Dan about it.
Now I was staring straight into Mahmoud’s face in that wordless way that communicates at a different level. There was a strength in it I should have expected, I suppose, after he’d taken on the mob so manfully, but strength wasn’t the right word. He had something in him I knew from a more familiar face – my brother’s – and the connection made me search deeper, into the part of him that would always do the things expected of him, the part that acted by what he believed in. They were the qualities in Tyke that made me want to be like him and they lived in this boy, too.
‘Come on, Jacob. It’s time I got you home,’ said Mum, tugging at my elbow and since the moment had passed I shuffled off beside her. In the car, there was no school principal to make Mum worry about the niceties. ‘Jacob, what in God’s name were you up to? You knew you’d be knocked over. They could have trampled you half to death.’ She finished off with something mothers love to smack you with. ‘And where would I be then, if you were killed in a playground fight?’
‘With no one to watch out for all the time,’ I said, not meaning anything by it, but she didn’t take it that way.
‘Do you think I care about how much I do for you, how much I worry about you? You are part of my life, and I wouldn’t trade your CP for a dozen able-bodied children.’
Jesus, I would.
An hour later, my entire group turned up at home, absolutely stoked.
‘Jacob, you bloody champion. Amy’s told us all about it,’ said Dan who led the way.
I’d never seen him like this, not about anything I’d done. Mitch and he were a tag team and if they didn’t quite pat me on the back, the effect was the same. ‘How many of them were there, again?’ asked Dan. He wasn’t asking me.
‘Seven,’ said Amy.
‘Seven with one blow,’ cried Mitch, quoting the fairytale Mrs de Marco read us in primary.
‘I only tangled with one. Sort of tackled him, that’s all. You’re exaggerating.’
They knew it, but it didn’t matter because this was my day and they were determined to celebrate it with me. Amy was behind the whole thing, I suspected, and I sent an accusing smirk her way which made her laugh. I hadn’t seen her so bright-eyed before, or maybe it was because those eyes had never been focused on me.
‘I saw everything,’ she told the others, surely not for the first time, and challenged me to shut her up, while hovering in the background I saw my mother switch between proud grins and a furrowed brow.
The whole thing was blowing up like a balloon and it was fun like I’d never had before, especially when I couldn’t buy that sort of connection to Amy with a planet of gold. They were barely gone when Dad turned up – on a Friday! – his drinks-with-his-mates night which usually became a counter meal and a few more beers in front of whatever Fox Sports was dishing up on the pub’s big screen. He was all over me like a rash, but at least he cut through the cripple-caution and all Mum’s talk of recklessness. ‘Gutsy stuff, Jacob. I’m proud of you.’
I tried to remember if he’d ever said those words to me. His pride in Tyke was naked and boisterous, where with me it was a touch on my shoulder or a hug when I’d been younger. He was a very gentle man for a guy who talked up the footy and car racing and the rest. You’ve done well there, Jake, he’d say about some picture I’d drawn or the way I’d stuck it out through physio, which could be damned painful.
‘Dad, I didn’t do much. Mahmoud fought them off himself and then Mr Lambert came. That’s it.’
He listened, smiled and behind his eyes I could see he was proud all over again because I was doing exactly what a hero was supposed to do – I was talking the whole thing down.
When Tyke called I almost groaned. Not again, and I’d been hoping to talk with him about other things, but with all this hero crap there’d be no chance to discuss Amy.
‘This is getting embarrassing, Tyke. I’m a bloody fraud,’ I told him, once I’d taken the phone to my room and flopped down on my bed. ‘What I did was pathetic, really, and it’s not like I was hurt.’
I poured out the full story, then, without false modesty and without hiding the viciousness of what Hattendorf’s mob were up to. For the first time, I explained the background, as well, about the rumours that had built up and how they must have broken over the only target those blind idiots could find close at hand.
Tyke didn’t interrupt and even when I went quiet he held back from the kind of things Dad had been saying. He took me seriously, that’s the thing. God, I missed him.
Finally he spoke, like a judge who’d been nutting out his verdict. ‘You could have gone for help like Amy, but instead you stepped in front of the Muslim kid.’
‘I knew there wasn’t time. I was trying to buy some, that’s all.’
‘That’s exactly what you did, Jake. Sounds to me like you made all the difference. Do you know how long it takes to make a mess of someone? Seconds, that’s all. Believe me, I’ve seen it. He wouldn’t have held them off for long, not seven and especially when this Hattendorf character got in on the act. Don’t be so down on yourself. You saved him a lot of grief.’
‘There was no one else,’ I said.
‘No, and there didn’t need to be.’
Wow, those last words blew it open for me and at last I gave way to real pride in what I’d done that day – a legitimate pride, in myself.
8
saturday
I woke on Saturday with sunlight heating my bed and an ache in front of my ear. I was on first shift at Blockbuster, but it was a rare day I didn’t check Facebook before leaving home and I was curious to see if Amy had sent me anything to enhance my status as hero.
Holy crap! My page had exploded and none of it was about what I’d done yesterday. Word was out that Mahmoud Rais had been seen near the school the night Charlotte was killed. There was a witness, with a name. Mrs Bagnold. I knew her – everyone did.
That was the start of it. The rest was plain ugly; comment after comment saying they wished Hattendorf’s mob had torn Mahmoud apart. Those were the actual words, as though he’d been found guilty in court and the punishment was to mutilate him like those animals.
Shit, shit, shit. Just because he was seen nearby didn’t make him the killer. Hadn’t these kids ever watched CSI or Law and Order? I began replying to the avalanche of comments, but even if I’d had all morning, the sheer number would have beaten me. I gave up after the second one and rode to work beside Mum in the Astra with a cold stone in my gut.
My boss at Blockbuster was Rory, who was fat and didn’t care. He was also a funny guy, not in the jolly roly-poly way, but clever-funny. He could quote every put-down line he’d ever seen in a movie and knew just how to slip them into a conversation.
‘Nice tie,’ he’d say to any bloke who came in without a shirt on and we had a few of those. That morning he had a surprise for me when he came
in about eleven. ‘You asked about The Truman Show, right? Well, old man Drakos got out of his coffin long enough to return it,’ he announced, holding up the DVD.
I tossed it in my bag, thinking I’d take a look after my shift, but, home again, I logged on straightaway and found messages from Amy, plus more on my phone. All said the same thing: call me.
‘Can you meet me?’ she asked. ‘The riverside at Meredith Park.’ (You couldn’t get away from Mum’s family in Palmerston.) She’d thought carefully about where to meet, too, because I could walk to the park without my back aching. When I arrived, she waved to me from a bench in the shade of trees that grew out of the riverbank.
‘Let’s go down to the water,’ she said when I joined her.
Families came here to swim because it was shallow with lots of sand for buckets and spades, but with so little water in the river we had the wide beach to ourselves. Sand wasn’t my friend; I managed by taking it slow, and when she noticed Amy offered her arm to steady me.
‘We got interrupted on Friday,’ she began, once we’d found a spot among the tree roots.
‘By those thugs.’
‘By your heroics,’ she said, smiling deliberately to make me blush and I probably did.
‘I wanted to thank you properly for those candles,’ and before I knew it she had leaned across and kissed me on the corner of my mouth. She pulled back before I could line up my face with hers and kiss her back. After all, it wasn’t a manoeuvre I’d had any experience with.
‘I know what you’ve been doing since the night we went up to Kibble’s paddock. I wasn’t sure at first, in the car, like maybe you didn’t really mean to hold me like that and get me wondering,’ she said. ‘But then you started moving us around to sit where you wanted at the table and pressing your leg against mine. I couldn’t be imagining things after that.’
The Beauty Is in the Walking Page 6