What I really can’t begin to understand is how it happened. How somebody could do it. How anybody could kill a girl. How they could take her into the bush and beat her down and hang her from a bare limb in her nightdress. How they could watch her die. How they could leave her there. How they could be capable. I snatch at a mosquito in front of my face. Wipe it on my shorts. I flinch. They’re everywhere. I hate insects.
Laura Wishart is dead and I touched her warm body and she’s cursed me with dread and sorrow. And I can only hope that they don’t find her until we get to the truth.
Jeffrey turns and looks around. No one has started their run in. One of the other bowlers gestures him through. Jeffrey smiles. He turns to stride in and bowl. And just as he pushes off, someone swiftly pulls his white shorts to his ankles. He stacks it, hard. They erupt again. The coach wheezes. The ball skips down the pitch. Jeffrey stands and retrieves his shorts, his little arse like a tan plum.
Meanwhile, the batsman has trapped the ball. He turns and claps the ball high and hard over the back of the nets, into a vacant block of trees and scrub. A huge hit. It’s a lost ball. Jeffrey watches it go, and it breaks my heart because that ball was a birthday gift that he’d sweated on for months.
And my eyebrows furrow and my nostrils flare as I watch Jeffrey cut his losses and walk toward his kitbag. I watch them ruffle his hair and shove him lightly.
And I look at this bastard coach. How he stands, how he intermittently pinches at his dick and shifts his weight. How his dark rodent eyes lazily survey this pack of boorish bullies. How his nubby fingers scissor his cigarette. And I think: If he can watch this with a thin grin, what else could he watch? What other cruel things could he view without intervening?
I’m chewing the inside of my mouth and my face is hot. I look away. Part of me is faintly resentful of Jeffrey for joining them in the first place and making me feel like this. I blink hard.
Jeffrey remains unperturbed. As though he were simply undone by fair play. And they’re still spitting words at him as he hoists his bag, but I don’t want to listen anymore. I just want to go. Jeffrey walks toward me. There are grass clippings in his hair.
His head is bowed as he approaches. But when he gets closer to me, his face lifts and splits into a smile.
“Did you see that first ball? Drifted in, spun out. Bang! Top of off! Thanks very much.” He spreads his hands like the ball actually exploded off the pitch.
“It’s true. It did, a fair bit,” I say, and it feels good and defiant.
“A bit? It did everything, Chuck. That second-last guy got a good square drive in, but I’ve got a deep point, so it’s covered.”
“I bet you’ve got a lot of fictional fielders in the right position once they’ve belted it.” I’m anxious to keep talking and diverting.
“Charles, if you knew anything about the game, you’d understand that you’ve got to have a deep point. It’s fundamental. You want to get them on the back foot, so you invite that shot. Then, bang! You’ve been trapped in front. Or you kick one up and you’ve got him at first slip.” Jeffrey executes some frenetic shadowboxing combinations, punctuated by sound effects.
“Easy, Muhammad.”
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your bat can’t hit what your eyes don’t see. Bang!” He kisses his fists.
“You’re insane.”
“What’s that, Chuck? I’m the greatest?”
“No, you’re a …”
“You’re probably right. I am the greatest.” And Jeffrey bursts into round two, bobbing and feinting, his kitbag flapping on his back. Still, I shake my head, angry.
“I hate those bastards.”
Jeffrey sighs.
“Chuck, if nobody had stolen his bike, Muhammad Ali wouldn’t have hit anybody.” Then he stops and points a finger up at me. “Meanwhile, you’re an idiot.”
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t go and talk to Eliza.”
“So?” I shrug.
“Chuck, you are the king of idiots. It’s not like she came this way because she didn’t know you were down here. She loves you.”
I shake my head.
“You’re blushing!” Jeffrey says dramatically, pointing like a witness before a police lineup. “You make me sick!”
“Jeffrey, firstly, I’m not blushing. I’m hot. It’s been a hot day. It’s the heat. On my face. Second, there is no way Eliza could have known we were going to the oval, so she couldn’t have gone that way purely to see me. Which means, essentially, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Jeffrey snaps his head back and drones, stumping along like a zombie, “Charles, you know nothing about the world of seduction. You need to be advised by an expert, namely me. I know everything about girls. They’re too stupid to be a mystery.”
“Jeffrey, you don’t know the first thing about girls.”
“Bollocks! What’s not to know?”
“Plenty.”
“I know why they wear makeup and perfume.”
“Why?” I sigh.
“Because they’re ugly and they stink!”
We lip-flap for the remainder of the walk home. Jeffrey spies a ripe snottygobble tree that hasn’t been raided yet. He picks a fistful and we share them as we ponder the motives of the person who first discovered milk from a cow, who it was that arranged the letters in the alphabet and why they decided on that order. We also question why kamikaze pilots wear helmets. But my heart is never really in the conversation.
When we turn into our street, I find myself slipping in behind Jeffrey, expecting dark and daunting vehicles to be parked at jagged angles on our lawn and people in suits and sunglasses to be waiting, pointing as they see me appear. Loudspeakers. Planes. Shocked onlookers.
I’m safe, but I feel no relief. If anything, it allows my unease to compound. It adds freight to the weight.
“Stop staring at my arse!” Jeffrey says. I absently move up to his side.
Our street is a little busier than when we left it. In the cooler air, neighbors natter over front fences, watering with hoses or zinc cans. Toddlers stagger about in the nude; other kids squeal and zip around beneath rotor sprinklers in their underwear. Dinner smells seep out of open front doors. You can hear television babble, parental censure, and laughter.
Jeffrey’s dad, An, is out front, working his garden with care. He grows various odd fruits and vegetables out in back, but out here is a neat and perfect presentation of color.
An Lu is an engineer at the mine, but of an evening he’ll be obsessively tending to either his produce or his flowers, even if he’s had to work late. Jeffrey’s front yard is like Corrigan’s own botanical garden. It’s easily the most impressive scene on this street. Jeffrey says An orders in seeds and saplings from all over the world, and he has a logbook for how and when each should be set in soil. An has his land planned with the precision of a symphony. There’s a year-round blush of hues, even through the Corrigan winter, but in spring it explodes like a frozen firecracker. And An is always there, coaxing and summoning its blooms like a conductor.
Most folks plan their evening stroll around An’s eruption of color. They like to point and pick out the wisterias, the wild poppies, the jasmine, the heirloom roses. They like to wonder aloud what the more exotic plants could be, and they marvel at the selection and the scent.
But of course, all I can ever see is the shifting constellations of insects that hover above the petal bursts, and I stay as far away as I can. I’m deathly afraid of them. Bees. Wasps. Hornets. Anything that flies or crawls or hops or stings. My mother is especially entertained by my phobia, but Jeffrey is the worst. One of his favorite jokes in the world is to warn me there’s a bee on my back, or a redback on my shoulder. He pauses, wide-eyed, and says Don’t move, like I’m about to tread on a land mine. It gets me every time.
One day I may be able to survey An Lu’s beautiful garden up close for what it is without my skin crawling at the terrifying hum of a milli
on poison-tipped assassins. But for now, my most comfortable vantage point is where I’m standing: outside my house.
Jeffrey hoists his bag further up his back. I peel off onto my lawn.
“I’d ask you round for dinner, but I really don’t like you,” I say.
“Pffft! I’d rather lick my own arse than dine with your kind.”
“Bollocks.” I say. “You’d rather lick your own arse because you like it.”
Jeffrey laughs. “It tastes better than your mum’s cooking!”
“Touché,” I laugh.
Jeffrey turns to go, but spins back, grinning.
“Hey, Chuck?”
“What?”
“What’s the hardest thing about liking Batman?”
I close my eyes and sigh. “I don’t know. What?”
“Telling your parents you’re queer!”
Of course, he dies laughing.
“You’re an idiot. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You’re an idiot. That’s hilarious.”
“I’m not the one licking my own arse.”
“If you had this arse, you would.” And Jeffrey’s shadowboxing recommences as he wanders away. “I’m so pretty! So pretty!”
“Bye, Muhammad.”
“Because they yarrrrr, Charrrrrlie! Because they yarrrrr!”
Jeffrey skips home. As he arrives, An stands abruptly and jabs his secateurs in his direction, yelling something stern and fierce. Jeffrey stands bolt still. It looks like he’s in the shit. I watch him duck his head and mooch inside.
I do the same.
***
During dinner, I try to sound my parents out about any news, but they don’t offer up anything. Afterward, I take my coffee straight to my sleepout. I’m not in the mood for television or talk. My dad asks if anything is wrong, and I just shrug and say I feel like reading.
I set my brew and open my louvres. I peer through them for some time, hoping to see Jasper Jones waiting in our backyard. He’s not there.
I try to read, but I can’t concentrate. I lay Pudd’nhead down. I use a dirty shirt to swipe the sweat from my face. I think about this time last night, and it seems a world away. It’s like I used to inhabit some other dimension, some other body.
Restless, I pull out my old brown suitcase from beneath my bed, unlock it, and take from it my yellow writing pad. I tuck myself into my desk, full of promise. Ready to spin the black silk. And I need it. The urge is urgent. I need to spill some of this over. I need to tell some of my secrets. But my pen won’t push. It’s still and dry and useless. I stare at the page.
I think I hear something. I leap onto my bed, squint through the louvres. I hiss Jasper’s name. Nothing.
So I sit back down. Clean my glasses, tap the lamp with my pen. Still nil. The strange thing is, I’m boiling over with words, they’re like a swarm in my head; I just can’t order them. They swirl and dip like insidious insects. Haunting and noisy and nonsensical.
I sigh and toss my pen aside, rest my cheek on my palm.
I need to see Jasper Jones. And soon. It’s not right having all this to myself. Laura Wishart is dead. And we buried her. In a water hole. We tied her to a stone. We did that.
And until I see Jasper Jones again, I can’t even begin to make sense of it. I can’t hope to get to the root of things. I need to talk to him about the likelihoods and contingencies and strategies and problems that are bubbling and spitting in my head and my belly. It’s like I’ve started to read a tragic book from the last page and I need to try to fill in the gaps, to write what came before. But I can’t. Not without Jasper. Not without the truth. And there’s just too much I don’t know.
Suddenly I frown and clutch my guts. I burst out of my room and smother our toilet a moment before my arse ejects something foul and molten. And there’s a moth. Right there. On the ceiling. A huge moth, big as a bird. Do they bite? I close my eyes and pretend it’s not here.
What do we do if somebody actually comes forward with information? It’s unlikely, but what if somebody really were aiming to set Jasper up? What if they saw what we did? What if Mad Jack Lionel calls in, tells the police where she is, and she’s not there? What happens to us? How much trouble are we in? Would Jasper be true to his word? Would I still be safe?
The moth applauds the light globe above me, casting strange distorted shadows. It’s enormous. It’s a giant moth. It probably has fangs. It could eat a rat in a single gulp. There are centipedes in the Amazon that eat bats. They hang from the ceilings of caves and snatch them as they flap past. I grit my teeth and turn away as more acid jets out of me.
And why hasn’t anything been reported yet? Aren’t the Wisharts worried? She’s the daughter of top brass, and high-class; where are the search teams and the news people? I palm my forehead. It’s this hot tension I can’t stand. The sleeping giant. The ticking bomb.
I retreat back to my room. I check my window again.
I quickly down my cup of joe, and it gives me a little buzz. I try Pudd’nhead again, forcing myself to follow the words, intermittently glancing out the window.
Something stalls me at the beginning of chapter twelve. From Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” My head tilts. Exactly. That’s what I’d wanted to say to Jeffrey about Superman. I wish he were here; I’d wave that quote like a red flag.
I run my thumb over those words. Maybe my father was right. Mark Twain has something smart to say about everything.
I shift to my desk and write those words down. Then I write around them and under them, shielding my words with a cupped palm, the same way I do in school. And I keep going, I strike up a rhythm, and it feels good.
See, I think it’s harder for me to get brave. It’s harder for me to suck it in and square up and bunch my fists. I think the less meat you’ve got on you, the more you know, the more you’re capable of being beaten, the more it sets you back. The lower your weight division, the more often you’re swinging up. I think the more you have to defend, the harder it is to press forward without looking back. I’d have Superman’s swagger if I couldn’t get hurt, but I’ve got the Charles Bucktin slouch. Because I bruise like a peach. And I’m afraid of insects. And I don’t know how to fight.
Does that mean it’s easier for Jasper Jones than me? But what about Jeffrey Lu? I don’t know. Maybe he’s bravest out of all of us.
My scribbling is interrupted.
“Jesus Christ, Charles Bucktin! What have you been eating?”
My mother has just walked into the toilet. I smile to myself. I have a dozen wisecracks about her cooking tickling the tip of my tongue, but each one would be a death sentence.
I keep writing. It’s aimless and desultory, but it feels good. Like I’ve loosened a valve. Like I’ve shared some of this mess, pared it off me.
It’s late when I ease up, exhausted. The house is hot and quiet. I slip onto my bed and check the window again. I whisper Jasper’s name to the space I want him to be standing in and give my eyes more than enough time to adjust. Nothing. I sigh.
I clear up my desk. Lay my yellow pad back in its case. Before I snap the combination lock, I thumb through the thin pages of my filled pads, just to touch their grooves and ridges. Right at the bottom, a thick brown paper package makes me smile. I untie the red string and sift through the bundle of pages.
This winter, Jeffrey and I spent rainy days writing a novel together. It was a penny adventure that quickly spiraled out of control, through no fault of my own. I’d sit with the pad on my lap while Jeffrey Lu paced in front of the fireplace, one arm behind his back, gesturing with an empty pipe, garrulous with wild ideas. The plot had more twists than a hurricane. Jeffrey took care of the action and the intrigue, mostly in the form of kung fu bouts and hot pursuits, while it was my responsibility to concoct an actual story (which Jeffrey dubbed “the girly stuff”) around these sequences. I was also dubbed Minister of Witty Dialogue.
Our f
ast-paced adventure involved a jaded ex-cop from Detroit called Truth McJustice who, after his wife mysteriously disappeared, quit the police force with an impeccable crime-fighting record and buried himself in his first love: archaeology.
What followed was a series of barely believable plot developments, with Truth discovering the Holy Grail, Joseph Stalin masquerading as a furious faux-Pope after kidnapping the real one, and Truth’s missing wife emerging as a brainwashed assassin called Ivana Knockyourblockov, hired to execute him and recover the precious artifact.
Of course, it ended in a flurry of martial arts in the Pope’s chambers. Truth was passionately reunited with his wife, while Stalin was duly hanged in St. Peter’s Square for heresy.
I didn’t really agree with lynching Stalin, but Jeffrey said we had to in order for his title to work. He wanted to call our masterpiece Pope on a Rope. I was more inclined toward Truth Will Set You Free. In the end, we agreed to mesh them together and make my suggestion a subtitle.
After we’d decided on a fitting nom de plume (Clifford J. Brawnheart), Jeffrey wrapped our manuscript in brown paper and concluded that therein lay the Great Australian Novel.
“But how can it be, really?” I argued. “It doesn’t even feature any Australians. And besides, to be honest, the coincidences seem a little outrageous. Our critics will lambast us.”
Jeffrey’s head snapped back and he groaned.
“Chuck, you are officially a Luddite. There will be no lamb-basting. You know nothing about literature. You need to understand that truth is stranger than fiction. Listen: people are willing to swallow any old tripe as long as you say it without flinching. They want to be told stuff. And they don’t want to doubt you either. It’s too hard. So if you say it like you really mean it to be true, then you’re away. Conviction, Charles. You could do with some. Look at Dickens! He got away with murder! And don’t get me started on Cheeses Christ and all that zombie resurrection bollocks. Now, there’s a twist ending that’s hard to sell. He’s dead, he’s dead—no, wait, who is that crawling out from behind that rock? Noooo, it couldn’t be! Oops, wait—yes! He’s alive! Hello, Zombie Cheeses! He’s back!”
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