‘Are you all right?’
‘Where does it hurt?’
Slowly I began to take in those faces, concerned to a fault and keen to help. ‘I’m okay. Yeah . . . I’m fine. Just give me a moment.’
I needed that moment to rewind the tape in my mind, like that other movie-maker’s trick, until I saw my body unsprawl itself and rise feet first back onto the step. Had I tripped out of clumsy eagerness? Maybe I had, but only with the help of a nudge in the back.
I stared up again at the worried faces lingering above me. None of them was apologetic and, as more of the moments after my fall settled into line, I remembered how they’d all come up the stairs to help me, not from behind me.
In the infirmary, I lay with my wrist on the cushion of my belly while the calls were made – more than one because Mum wasn’t in the office. Dad appeared soon after.
‘You’re in the wars, mate,’ he said, helping me to my feet for the drive to the surgery.
‘Sprained, not broken,’ was our GP’s verdict, but we had to go up to the hospital for an X-ray just in case and by the time that was done there was no point in Dad going back to work.
‘Slow day, anyway,’ he said as he created a bed of ice for my wrist, something he’d done a hundred times tending to Tyke’s strains and sprains.
‘I can’t remember you ever picking me up from school like this.’
‘No, it’s always been your mum’s job, but she’s getting busier all the time; practically runs the office these days. Her brothers are good at the blokey bluster with clients, but she does the hard-nosed business. S’pose that was how she browbeat all those doctors and therapists into going the extra yard for you, Jake.’
He was right about that. I’d been too young to notice through most of it, but occasionally I still had to see the same people in Brisbane to check on my legs and last year it had been obvious. ‘Dr McCreedy just about saluted Mum last time we were there,’ I said.
Dad’s face broke into a wry grin which spread to mine. We locked eyes for a moment wondering if we laughed too openly, would it seem like an insult? Without a word we decided it was fine.
‘Your mum was determined you’d get the same chance in life as everyone else, Jacob. When they started talking wheelchairs before you were even out of the maternity ward I saw the steel take hold. Not my boy, she was saying.’
I knew all this, of course. We’d had the same conversations many times, in different words, and I didn’t mind how often he reminded me. I still shuddered at what school would have been like in a wheelchair, and worse, with a tongue that flopped about in my mouth like a fish. But on that Friday afternoon, it wasn’t school I pictured from a wheelchair; I tried to judge my chances with Amy if I had no proper legs at all and didn’t like what I saw.
Close to four Mum turned up, full of apologies and concern for my wrist which had barely bothered to swell thanks to the ice.
‘How did it happen?’
Good question. If I even hinted at a push, Mum would be ranting at Mrs Schwartz before the words had faded from the room. Besides, somebody pushed me was the wail of a seven-year-old.
‘Got careless on the stairs,’ I answered and for my lie I had to endure a glare of motherly exasperation. In some quarters I was seven years old, apparently.
14
mahmoud rais is innocent
The sun worked its way under my eyelids earlier than I wanted it to on Saturday. Too late I pulled the curtain across and rolled away from the window, but my mind was already kicking into gear so I sat at my desk and tried a bit of Biol. Exam block wasn’t far away. I was thinking about breakfast when Dad knocked on my door.
‘Hey, studying at seven on a Saturday morning. You’ve changed your tune.’
‘Just want to do well. They’re the last exams I’ll ever do.’
I hadn’t thought about it like that until the words were out of my mouth. My last exams ever, so why did I want to do well when I’d start at Merediths whether I aced every subject or bombed like a B-52?
‘You want bacon and eggs?’ Dad asked. ‘Mum’s still asleep, so it’ll be you and me and the newspaper. There’s something on the front page you might want to see.’
I was hardly going to give up bacon and eggs to revise Mendel’s Law of whatever, but his last comment had me out of my seat quicker than usual. ‘What’s in the paper?’
‘You’ll see,’ he said, teasing me now. ‘After your demo at the cop shop turned sour on you, this should make you feel better.’
He should have had a stopwatch on me as I sprinted up the hall. Absolute world record and we’re not talking the Paralympics, either.
‘Holy Jesus!’ I breathed, leaning over The Advocate. FLICK-KNIFE CLEARED, was the headline. The article beneath said forensic tests had ruled out Mahmoud’s knife as the weapon used in the mutilations. There was nothing about Mahmoud himself being cleared, in fact no mention of his name at all and that cut through my excitement even before it had taken hold.
‘He still won’t be able to come back, poor kid,’ I said, ‘but it gives the finger to those detectives. Makes things better for me, too. Now I can have another go.’
‘Another go at what?’
‘At stopping all the crap about Mahmoud. Palmerston has to know he isn’t the one,’ I told Dad, snatching up the newspaper and shaking it in front of his eyes. ‘Everyone in town should admit they were too quick to judge him.’
I was caught up in my own enthusiasm, which was why the doubt I found in his eyes brought me down with a thump.
‘What? You think I’m wrong?’ I asked, more hotly than I should have.
‘No, looks like he’s innocent, sure, but . . .’ He searched for a way to explain and frowned when the right words seemed elusive. ‘People are scared because of this Ripper thing, Jake. They’re not thinking straight, maybe, but if you go hard over this . . . I don’t know . . . seems like rubbing our noses in it, don’t you reckon?’
After breakfast I logged on to see whether kids around town had begun to pick up the news, but it was too early yet, so I thought I’d hurry things along with a status update that might fan out across town.
When that was done I picked out individual posts that had turned up when Mahmoud’s knife was first confiscated. My heart was back in the game now and pumping hard with an anger I did my best to keep out of what I wrote. Better to pick apart each accusation line by line until all the distortions and just plain bullshit crumbled to dust. I was in the clouds that morning, fired up and downright amazed at the words my fingers put on the screen.
By late in the morning, comments had begun to turn up.
So he didn’t use his flick-knife. Doesn’t prove anything. No one from Palmerston would cut open an animal like that.
That was the second one to come in and it pretty much summed up the rest – most of them, anyway. At least it didn’t come decorated with the four-letter stuff that some kids aimed at Mahmoud and at me for that matter.
Late in the morning Amy rang. ‘Hey, I read the paper like you said to on Facebook. You must be feeling better, eh? Dan and the rest won’t be so mad at you now.’
So they had cried off deliberately on Friday. Amy didn’t realise she’d given herself away and already she was circling around the reason for her call.
‘What are you up to?’ she asked.
‘I’m waiting for you to come over and help me study.’
Not even Svenson could come up with a word for the sound that came back at me. ‘Laugh’ doesn’t capture it and ‘gasp’ sounds like she was shocked, when what she really expressed was the joy that comes when you’ve got just what you wanted without knowing you wanted it.
‘I’ll get Mum to drive me,’ she said, and for half an hour after she arrived we did go over stuff Miss Jenkins had hinted would be in the exam. All through that half-hour, though, my laptop stayed open on the desk beside us and I couldn’t help leaning over to check each new message. Finally, Amy had to ask.
‘Wha
t’s with your Facebook? Mine’s never that active.’
I had to either close it down or tell her how I’d spent the morning.
‘Let me see,’ she demanded and I showed her my careful demolition of all the false stories that had built up around Mahmoud.
‘This stuff is fantastic, Jacob, the way you can make your point in words . . .’
‘I don’t know how many people I’m convincing, though. Have a look at these,’ and I showed her the abusive comments.
‘That’s awful,’ she muttered, pointing at one of the worst. ‘Do you really want that sort of thing on your page?’
‘They’re not all like that,’ and I scrolled to one that said, Way to go, Jacob.
‘Why don’t you set up a separate page?’ Amy suggested.
As soon as she said it I saw the sense and in moments I had a name for the page – Mahmoud Rais is Innocent; in my head I was already designing the layout. A page would be a Net version of the knife protest, a way to say the crimes weren’t solved yet and it wasn’t fair to pick on Mahmoud as the only suspect.
When it was done Amy moved to my bed and sat with her back against the wall. ‘Do you have any movies on your laptop?’ she asked.
I didn’t. Our download limit was too small. ‘I’ve got an old Jim Carrey movie.’
‘Great.’ She didn’t even ask what it was.
I joined her sitting up on the bed with the laptop between us like I’d done so many time with Mitch. The Truman Show was weird at first. Instead of pratfalls and the kind of cringing laughs you’d expect from Jim Carrey, he started off with cheesy cheerfulness that seemed to be forced on him. Ten minutes in I figured out this was a totally different kind of movie, sort of serious, about a guy whose whole life was a reality TV show and he didn’t even know it.
My attention slipped, or did I just become more aware of Amy beside me? I stopped taking in the screen and turned to watch her, our shoulders touching, hips, thighs, too. She knew I was doing it and rotated her foot to rub against mine. I kept staring at her until she turned to face me.
I wanted to kiss her – a long, lingering kiss. We’d lie flat with our arms around each other and it wouldn’t matter that Mum and Dad were on the other side of the wall because that would be everything I wanted, anyway – the warmth, the closeness, Amy’s soft curves and the willing way she would kiss me back. I would happily lie like that for hours, the rest of my life. . .
Never happened, though. Amy went back to the movie and I didn’t have the nerve to draw her face towards me again with my hand. I tried Svenson’s game, with words.
‘Amy,’ I whispered, ‘you make me happy.’
She went red in the face and kissed me, a quick peck on the lips before I even knew it. Yeah, it was fun, but I wanted more than a quick peck and I wanted to make it happen, not wait for her.
‘No one says the things you say, Jacob.’
An A plus at last, I thought.
Moments later Mum knocked on the door. ‘Would you like a drink, Amy?’ she asked. ‘I don’t suppose Jacob has offered you anything.’
She went off to get us Cokes while we settled back with The Truman Show. It was further along by now and poor Truman was starting to suspect the people around him weren’t genuine – all sorts of obstacles would pop up in his way if he tried to leave the town where they kept him prisoner. My sense of injustice was pricked, just as it had been for Mahmoud. Go Truman!
Amy wasn’t really into the movie so much and once we’d done with Cokes we studied Biol until she went home about five. Only one message had turned up on our new Facebook page, from Chloe, saying it was a great idea and she’d asked everyone she knew to ‘like’ it.
I doubt Chloe had friended Svenson on Facebook. Most likely she simply told him about the new page at school on Monday, but however Svenson found out he sent a message to the new page at three-thirty-two on Monday afternoon when he would still have been at school. Nothing extravagant – just congratulations for making a stand and a few comments agreeing with others. He didn’t identify himself as a teacher at our school or even a Palmerston resident, which meant only locals from town would have known who he was.
This might seem like an unnecessary detail, but that was the surprising thing: I had imagined only kids we knew from around town would show any interest, yet there were messages from people who didn’t live anywhere near Palmerston. There was even one from America, for God’s sake. Maybe it wasn’t true to say Mahmoud Rais is Innocent had gone viral, but I was certainly chuffed.
Then came Tuesday. Classes that week were our last before the exams and mostly there were hints about what to expect in the paper mixed in with farewells and reminiscences. Svenson was relaxed, even had us laughing as we looked back on the year. When his eye fell on me, he seemed especially pleased.
‘You’ve come on more than anyone, Jacob. I hope you’ll explore what you’re really capable of next year and that means uni – you understand that, don’t you?’
This wasn’t the time to tell him about my job at Merediths. Then somehow he was telling the others about the page I’d set up to support Mahmoud. ‘Perfect name for it,’ he said, venturing down the aisle towards me to show his enthusiasm. ‘Mahmoud Rais is Innocent. A brave thing to say around town at the moment. People don’t want to know and it’s all too obvious why. You all see that, I hope.’
He’d been talking to the whole room, but now he locked eyes with me, as though this was between the two of us alone. Even the tone of his voice became personal in a way teachers don’t often speak to students. ‘Well done, mate, you’re one of the few people in Palmerston ready to admit The Ripper is one of your own and not a convenient outsider.’
He was mouthing what I thought, but even as he said it I remembered Dad’s words. Rubbing our noses in it.
When he moved on to a different topic, I dared to glance around me and if a groan didn’t quite escape between my lips it was there, deep in my throat all the same. Many of the faces around me smouldered at what Svenson had said, even kids like Alicia Greaves who’d joined my knife protest and, since they didn’t have the balls to confront him openly, they turned their sullen fury towards me.
We didn’t find out until later, but at the very moment Svenson was praising me in front of my classmates Soraya, her mum and her auntie were approaching Palmerston’s only supermarket. After a week pretty much imprisoned in their home, both families were low on supplies, but with Mahmoud gone and after Saturday’s article about the knife they judged it safe to do a grocery run.
The first shouts of abuse came before they’d collected a trolley, but the woman stood a way off as though she was afraid to confront the three of them on her own. They ignored her and steered their way up and down the aisles only to find every face laden with hostility while some simply fled in the opposite direction. The foul-mouthed woman followed them into the supermarket and soon attracted a companion. The manager couldn’t silence the pair and, with so many bystanders showing their allegiances in their eyes, perhaps the manager didn’t try as hard as she might. Leaving their half-filled trolley in the vegetable aisle, the women returned home in tears.
Everyone in town heard about it, but if I could picture the incident in detail it was because Chloe got the story from Soraya and posted a full description on the Mahmoud page. On Thursday, Soraya’s dad and his brother stormed into the meatworks and threw their uniforms in the foreman’s face. By midday both families were gone from Palmerston for good.
15
comments
Mahmoud Rais is Innocent began to build up a small following and on Monday and Tuesday, at least, every comment was supportive, whether it came from a name I knew or not. Then, as though taking their cue from the screeching women in the supermarket, anti’s began to turn up. Some were no more than rants in four-letter words, but a few simply warned we were being too soft on Mahmoud.
Again, I carefully pointed out where rumour had hardened into fact, working like a kid dismantling a Leg
o house – first take off the roof, then remove the interlocking bricks one layer at a time until finally there is nothing left.
By Friday, though, I had to stop and concentrate on my exams. So, a weekend of study. Everyone was doing the same. Amy sent me a text at eleven on Saturday. Three hours already.
I texted back. I started at dawn.
Liar, she replied.
U 2, I shot back.
All right. 2 hours, and I’ve handcuffed my ankles to the desk.
It was a way to stay connected and I loved it.
After dinner on Saturday I called her just to hear her voice.
‘My dad’s like a five-headed bear with a migraine in each one,’ she said.
‘Because of the meatworks?’
‘Yeah, the workers are dirty he’s cancelled their shifts and when it’s not the killing-floor guys it’s the farmers on his back because no cattle were sold at Friday’s auction.’
Our new Facebook page didn’t get a mention, but after the call I logged on to see what had been added, which was easy because the answer was zippo! No one had time for this when the exams were about to start and, besides, did it matter anymore if Mahmoud was innocent when he wasn’t coming back? I wondered whether to take down the page altogether.
Sunday was a repeat of Saturday until I would rather sit a year of exams than look at another book. Amy’s texts trailed off and I had almost forgotten the phone on the desk beside me until it pinged late in the day with a message from her.
U need to check Facebook.
I guessed she meant Mahmoud’s page and logged straight on to find two new comments. The first was from a girl, or maybe it was a woman, named Laura Ignatio. From an earlier comment I knew she lived in Melbourne.
Anything new in the Palmerston Case? You guys have gone quiet.
Svenson had posted a reply:
For weeks Mahmoud Rais has been subjected to vilification in his absence and the only people to offer an opposing voice have been Jacob O’Leary and his supporters on this page. Now the Rais families have been shamefully attacked as well and, understandably, they have fled. This has already had repercussions for the town and they will only get worse. Palmerston relies on its meatworks, yet it has driven out the very people essential to its survival and there is little chance of luring replacements to town when the new men can expect the same treatment. Palmerston’s folly may well lead to its demise. Shakespeare couldn’t have scripted events more tragically.
The Beauty Is in the Walking Page 11