Her shoulders slackened and she sighed wearily. She knew we had to get this out of the way between us, but that didn’t make it any easier.
She led me across the road to a triangle of grass outside the museum, to a shaded bench beneath the only tree. A sandwich board propped open on the footpath proclaimed the museum open, but we had this tiny park to ourselves.
‘I said some things the other day,’ she began. ‘I didn’t mean them to come out the way they did. They hurt you and I want you to know how sorry I am.’ She gave up her battle with tears and let a few painful sobs escape through a down-turned mouth. ‘It’s not really who I am.’
‘I’m over it already,’ I told her, and wondered if it was true. Of all the things that had gone sour in recent days, Sunday, in Amy’s room, had been the worst. I didn’t care about the words – spastic, spit in the corner of my lips. I resented the way she hadn’t taken me seriously as a boyfriend, or was I just angry at the way I’d let her do it?
She dared look at me after more time spent glaring at her shoes, the bench beside her, anywhere but my face. I flashed a smile to reassure her and, the truth was, I still liked her. Ten minutes ago I’d wanted to sit beside her in the car, where she would have kissed me on the dry side of my mouth and told the others it was an end-of-school kiss.
That was before I’d reclaimed my cane, though.
She must have found forgiveness in my face because she straightened up and offered a tentative grin in return.
‘Do you mean that?’ she asked.
I nodded and she let go another sob, of relief this time. Then she laughed at herself. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, though now she was apologising for the tears. ‘You’re letting me off easier than I deserve.’
‘Oh, I might be planning massive revenge,’ I said.
‘No, you’re not. You’re too soft-hearted for that.’ She nudged me, then dabbed away the last of the tears and let out a long breath as though she’d been holding it in all the way from the corner.
‘What I said just now, about not being myself that day, I didn’t understand how true it was until I said it. Things were going on at home.’
‘What was going on?’ I asked, though not to pry. I didn’t really care what she told me. I was being the listener out of habit more than compassion. ‘Must have been something big,’ I said, just as innocently.
Amy stared as though I’d slipped on a Frankenstein mask.
Why the sudden horror? Now I did want to know. ‘What was going on?’ I asked more insistently.
She looked away. ‘Nothing. Forget I said it.’
‘No, you should talk about it. Must have really shaken you up if you missed that exam.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ and she was shifting on the bench, as agitated as she’d been on the corner. ‘It was a family thing that’s over now, anyway. My dad sorted it out. I don’t have to worry. No one has to worry anymore.’
She stayed silent after this rush of words. More than that, her mouth clamped shut like a prisoner under interrogation.
I didn’t push any harder. We were done, really. She’d got the forgiveness she was after and it was obvious she just wanted to go. She was simply waiting for me to stand up first, as though she needed permission, but I was fumbling with her words inside my head. A family thing. Why hurt me so savagely if I had nothing to do with what was upsetting her? Yet she’d been furious with me, and frightened. Frankenstein again. I’d thought she was seeing me as a monster and that had hurt me more than anything she’d said. Now I had second thoughts. I’d missed something.
‘Your dad sorted it out,’ I said, repeating her words.
‘Please, Jacob. Leave it alone,’ she begged. Afraid of something, definitely afraid.
I couldn’t leave it alone. My mind was playing back through the weekend – not just the hurt of Sunday. She’d been uneasy when I called her the day before. We’d talked about Mahmoud’s innocence and when I started in about The Ripper being a local . . .
‘You know who it is, don’t you?’
Fear became panic.
‘No,’ she gasped, answering my question directly. Then she tried to backtrack. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The Ripper, of course. You didn’t want me stirring things up again. That’s why you were mad with me.’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Jacob. How would I know who it was?’
She could deny it all she liked, but she had given herself away with that first look. Even now she gripped one hand over the other tight enough to crush the bones.
‘Tell me,’ I demanded.
‘No, I can’t.’
‘But you do know.’
She dropped her chin onto her chest and began to sob again, making a different sound this time, the surrender of abject misery. ‘I promised Dad.’
It was a promise she’d keep, too. I could demand my walking stick from Dan, but this belonged to Amy and I didn’t have the right. Damn, I was so close to knowing.
And then I knew.
Sunday at Blockbuster was the key. The car loaded up for leaving and Rory taunting our best customer even as he lamented losing him. He was one of the oddballs listed on Mitch’s fingers. It had been a game, a stupid game!
‘Your cousin,’ I said. ‘Callum Landis is The Ripper.’
‘Oh God. Dad will kill me,’ Amy wailed. ‘Please, Jacob, you won’t tell the police, will you? Please!’
I wasn’t thinking of police stations right then, or what this news meant for Mahmoud Rais. Her dad had sorted it out, she’d said. I pictured Amy’s dad in a house bulging with kids. One of his own was The Ripper, a secret any man would surely keep to himself. So how did Amy know?
‘You were the one who told him,’ I said, guessing out loud before I’d quite seized on the thought. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You saw something, you were an eyewitness.’
‘No, I didn’t see him do it.’
‘Then how did you know?’
‘The blood. I saw him in our backyard, hosing blood out of his shirt. He thought everyone was out of the house, you see, but the exams . . . I didn’t have to go until the afternoon. He got a fright when I put my head out the window to see why the tap was running. Told me some bullshit story about a messy shift at the meatworks. I thought it was strange because they wear overalls. Never get blood on their own clothes.’
‘Then you heard about the horse?’
‘Yes, when I got to school.’
‘No wonder you couldn’t do the exam.’
Eyes closed, fighting tears again, she nodded over and over. ‘I threw up. Mum had to come from work to get me.’
‘You told her.’
She shook her head. ‘Mum would’ve freaked out. I waited for Dad to come home. He went white in the face, Jacob, like I’ve never seen him. Said I couldn’t tell anyone else, just the two of us. Then he went out to the caravan. I thought he was going to kill bloody Callum, but he was back ten minutes later and making calls. He came to my room, closed the door. Callum was leaving, he said. Saturday would look too suspicious. It had to look like he was going because there were no shifts.’
‘He’s gone to Brisbane,’ I said.
‘Dad’s got a mate there, going to give Callum work driving a delivery truck or something. If he’s not carving up carcasses all day, maybe the madness will go away. That’s what Dad’s hoping. I don’t know, Jacob. You won’t tell, will you?’
You’d think we were little kids and I’d caught Amy with her hand in the lolly jar. ‘No, Amy, I won’t tell,’ I whispered.
She was shaking beside me and too late I saw what the remembering had done to her. She’d seen the horse’s blood on her cousin’s shirt. Not then, but hours later, the truth had fallen on her without mercy.
I slipped my arm around her and she nestled against me. ‘I can only guess what it was like when you knew it was Callum. Poor Amy, you’ve had to carry this around with you for days. Must be so hard,’ I whispered into the hair behind her ear.
‘You have no idea. At home my brothers were fighting to tell the goriest details. All I could think of was the dead horse and I couldn’t tell anyone, had to hold it in on my own. Dad said it would wreck the whole family if the truth got out and we wouldn’t be able to look anyone in the eye for years.’
My left arm joined the right, hugging Amy to me as she wept and immediately she pressed against me as I’d once dreamed of her doing, unafraid to show the need in herself for what I could give her.
‘The Ripper’s been living in our backyard the whole time. My own cousin.’
There was more, forced out between sobs while Amy relived the unbearable gap between knowing it was Callum and telling her father. For those hours, Amy alone had carried Palmerston on her shoulders, like Atlas holding up the sky. I wished I could have helped her.
Words finally extinguished tears and she sat up straight, breaking my hold but letting my right arm stay in place behind her. There was an intimacy in her eyes I hadn’t been allowed to see before. ‘You’re so good to me, after the way I treated you,’ she said and then she was kissing me on the mouth. She had to lean right across to do it since I hadn’t seen it coming. It was a tender kiss and lingering, the longest we had ever shared, but it was still carefully aimed to avoid the treacherous corner of my mouth.
What did the kiss mean? Was this the invitation back into the group that my other friends had botched so badly on the road? Her hand touched my cheek, which made the moment more tender, yet I couldn’t help thinking, there’s no one to see us and she knows it. And she had kissed me. It didn’t matter if the kiss was payment for a few minutes of kindness, or one more way to show she was sorry about last week. I wanted to know something else entirely. Would she look so pleased if I’d leaned across to kiss her?
I could test that right now. My arm was still around her shoulders, holding her in place. I only needed to push forwards and find her lips as she’d found mine. It came to me then that I didn’t want to. I wasn’t afraid she would pull away; I simply didn’t feel the affection for Amy that had once made me think of her a hundred times a day.
‘Will you come with us now? Things are starting to warm up.’
She nodded past me towards Meredith Street and I turned to follow her eye. Senior shirts everywhere, waving at the cars ambling by and cheering when a driver sounded his horn to show he remembered his own last day at school.
‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I murmured.
The way she’d said ‘us’ so easily showed she still thought I belonged around that picnic table. The word was a kiss of a different kind, and, like the real kiss, it had come from her.
We crossed the road together, Amy eager to plunge into the fun yet keeping pace with me all the way without the least resentment. She truly had been someone else last week and if that was all that had made her say those things I would have stayed with her through the afternoon.
I didn’t, though, and on the slow walk home I asked the wolf’s head why.
Because you can do better than that, Jacob, it told me.
23
big night
I lay on my bed until Tyke arrived about four.
‘You want to help me load my weights into the Red Beast?’ he asked. ‘Moving into a bigger place next week, so I’ve got room for them now.’
Afterwards we sat on the tailgate sharing a Coke.
‘You know how you were going to take me to Schoolies tomorrow? No need. I’m staying here,’ I told him.
‘What happened? I thought you were sharing with Mitch and the rest.’
‘My friendships are currently under review,’ I said. Svenson would have been proud.
‘What about Amy?’
‘We broke up,’ I said. Could you break up if you’d never really hooked up? Stuff it. I had enough questions to answer.
‘Hey, Tyke, that movie you told me about. The Truman Show. I watched it.’
‘D’you like it?’
‘Yeah, but what do you think Truman did once he’d escaped from under that dome?’
After a bit of eyebrow dancing and a pout of his lips he said, ‘Didn’t matter. The movie was about his escape.’
It mattered to me – if I was Truman. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about escape in the last few days, not from Palmerston, from other things. It came to me after a while that I just had. Escaped, I mean. When I wouldn’t get in Mitch’s car and especially when I’d beaten Dan to get my cane back, something had changed. Same with Amy. I’d walked away. You didn’t need legs for that kind of walking.
‘What am I going to do, Tyke? To be fair to Mum I have to stay here, but if I do I’m going to stare at the road out of town every day.’
‘You’re serious about uni, then?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s gone way past that. It’s about what I can do, whether I’m more than what people think I am, more than what I think I am.’
He listened while I told him about Mum on Sunday night and the decision I’d woken up with the next morning. I wasn’t so sure it was decided anymore.
‘Do you have any ideas for me, Tyke? Do you know what I should do?’
‘Yeah, I know what you should do,’ he said quickly, then left the words dangling there for a stretched-out moment. ‘But I’m not going to tell you. Time to man up,’ he said with a final pat on my thigh. Then he went back into the house.
Watching him go, I knew there’d be no weeks of mulling things over. It had to be tonight. I wouldn’t sleep until I’d made up my mind.
At six-thirty we headed for school – my last time in a school uniform. I hadn’t sat in the back of Dad’s car for so long and I spent the first half of the drive trying to remember the last time, but before I could settle that question I was searching even further back. When was the last time Tyke had sat beside me with Mum in the front and Dad at the wheel like happy families? The night we went to Tyke’s graduation, maybe. Now we were going to mine.
Once we reached Meredith Street, my reflections changed tack. It was Friday night, the pubs were full and people were out on the footpaths – hardly a crush like I’d seen in cities on television, but enough to draw my eye. A week had passed since the third mutilation, the police were clueless and wherever two or three people stood talking I could guess their words. Who would do such a thing?
I knew and I wasn’t going to tell. My childish words to Amy had been a promise, I’d decided in the hours since, and somehow that summed up the futility of everything I’d done. If Mahmoud had finally been exonerated, it was no thanks to me. I rolled my cane between my hands until the wolf’s head faced me. What have you got to say about that? I asked. Could I have done better? Did I do anything at all?
Dad parked the four by four and together we mixed in with the other families making their way through the gates. Tyke spotted a friend, another brother like himself, come to do the right thing.
‘Big night,’ he called to his old classmate. I was to hear those words a lot over the next few hours.
The gym had been made over since this morning, the circus tent giving way to more sober decor, although the balloons had survived the cull and so had the big screen which was cycling through the same slideshow.
‘I have to go sit up front,’ I told Mum and left the three of them to find seats.
Not that anyone was sitting down yet. I didn’t want to mill with the rest and slipped out into the night air again instead. Even that wasn’t enough and with my cane picking out its rhythm on the concrete I headed into the darkness of the undercroft until, on the far side, I could look up at the window of Svenson’s classroom.
It wasn’t like I planned to stay long or that I’d been driven there by the sense of exclusion I’d invented for myself that morning as armour against my own misery. That had mostly died away since leaving school. A lot of things had changed this afternoon. No, I just wanted the moment to myself, and if it was Svenson’s window I picked out among the rest, then why not, since he’d handed out the rope I was using for my personal tug of w
ar.
Tonight, I reminded myself. You have to decide tonight.
I wasn’t going to get my moment, though. Footsteps made me turn, their particular fall telling me it would be a female silhouette approaching. The height confirmed it was Chloe, although I knew her walk well enough to be sure without the easy clue. We hadn’t spoken since my dust-up with Svenson, but she wouldn’t have come after me if our friendship had died on the mugball court as I’d feared.
‘Big night,’ I called.
‘So I’ve heard,’ she shot back and immediately we were chuckling between ourselves in a conspiracy that no ears listening from the shadows would have understood.
‘Everyone’s asking how I feel,’ she said, once she’d joined me. ‘Either that, or they ask when I’m leaving for Schoolies.’
‘How do you feel?’ I asked, to goad her.
She let out an exaggerated groan.
Then silence ate the next few seconds as though we’d lost track of whose turn it was to speak. Finally she offered a single word. ‘Restless.’
The word stunned me for a moment until I understood she was answering the question I’d only asked for a laugh. Even then, how could she know what the word meant to me?
She couldn’t, of course. It had never occurred to me that others might be the same, not excited, or frightened or impatient, simply restless in a way that eluded explanation.
I went back to staring up at D Block.
‘You’re looking at Svenson’s window, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘I was wondering if I’d have stood up for Mahmoud if it wasn’t for him. He was the first one to see something more in me, except for Tyke.’
‘Tyke?’
‘My brother. Everyone else . . . they . . .’ Get it out there, Jake, I told myself. Your tongue will handle it. ‘All my life I’ve had people standing around me like . . . like a shield.’ I’d almost said ‘dome’. ‘They’re determined to take care of me, so the world doesn’t break through and harm me. None of them have ever thought I might break out and do some damage of my own.’
‘Damage?’ she asked uncertainly.
‘Just a way of saying things.’
The Beauty Is in the Walking Page 18