Jasper Jones

by Craig Silvey;

“Jim Quincy! He’s out!”

  “What do you mean, out? Out how?”

  “Out! Out-of-the-match out! We started warming up before, and then all of a sudden he went down like a bucket of shit! Turns out it’s his appendix! They rushed him off to hospital, he has to have it out!”

  “Out?”

  “Out, Chuck!”

  “So you’re in the side? Officially officially?”

  “Well, yair. They already handed in the team list, so they couldn’t pick anybody else. So now I’m playing! People were pissed, Chuck. You should have seen it. All these parents crowding round the umpires and coaches, trying to get someone else in. But the umpires wouldn’t have a bar of it. Huzzah for protocol! Bang! Jeffrey Lu on debut!”

  He shadowboxes between deliveries. His excitement is infectious.

  “I can’t believe it. D’you reckon they’ll let you bowl?”

  “I don’t know!” Jeffrey smiles. “They’d be practically retarded not to. They should have made me captain, Chuck. This field is the essence of stupidity. Look at it! It’s an outrage. Look at this bloke. He’s rubbish. He’s all over it. He couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.”

  “A who with a what?”

  But it’s the end of the over again, and Jeffrey skips off. I sit down on the boundary and watch him go. I’m anxious for him.

  I survey the other side of the field, taking in the activity. It seems like an awful lot of people for a junior Country Week game. It’s strange. Clusters and lines of people are in and around the pavilion. I can see members of the shire council milling around in suits, backs straight with self-importance and station. They look staunch and proud. There are trestle tables with food and drinks, and ladies behind them fussing and nattering. Beside them, a canvas sheet held straight between star pickets that boasts the town emblem and creed. The Australian flag hangs limply over the clubhouse.

  I wonder what has brought all this on. I know that we’re playing Blackburn, a neighboring shire, which makes it something of a grudge match. But even so, it seems a lot of bells and whistles for a relatively small event. I ask Jeffrey when he swaggers back.

  “Yair, I don’t know,” he shrugs. “It’s certainly queer, Charles. Like you.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  Jeffrey walks in crouching, walks back relaxed.

  “But it was really weird before the match,” he begins. “One of the town councilors addressed all the players like he was bloody Winston Churchill or something, saying how great Corrigan is and how rich our history is, how proud our traditions are, all this bollocks. I didn’t know what was going on. But people clapped at the end of it. Some women were getting a weep on, dabbing at their faces with hankies. It was mental.”

  “That is strange,” I say.

  “Humans, Chuck. There’s no telling what they’ll do next. Unless it’s this batsman. Watch. Next ball, he’s going over the top, I bet you. He’s impatient, he’s rubbish, and he’s all bottom hand.”

  Sure enough, the next ball is whipped high over mid-wicket. One bounce and it is over the line.

  “Told you,” Jeffrey says with his hands behind his back. “Lucky shot. We’ll get him soon, but. He’s going to sky one. You wait. I’m the finest mind in the game, Chuck. I’m practically a clairvoyant.”

  “Really? Do you know what I’m thinking right now?”

  “Hmm. Let me see. Yes. Yes, I think I do. You’re marveling at my sensational cricketing brain, and not only am I completely gorgeous to look at, I have unparalleled talents in all facets of the game.”

  “Yeah. Wow. Actually, that’s pretty close to the exact opposite to what I am thinking.”

  “So you’re thinking about yourself, then?”

  I have no riposte. The little bastard has got me. He laughs.

  Another few overs pass. It’s largely uneventful. Jeffrey has dubbed the increasingly frustrated batsman the Spider Monkey, because he can’t stop swinging. He’s starting to flay wildly, looking to blast the ball over the infield, but he’s getting bogged down.

  “He’s not long now, Chuck,” Jeffrey says.

  And he’s right. The very next ball, the crowd gasps. Just as Jeffrey predicted, another wild swipe across the line produces a top edge. It skies high. Jeffrey makes a break for a ball just as I realize it’s his chance. He could get there. Jeffrey has pace. He barrels toward it, his little legs like pistons. Everyone is watching. The world has stopped for this moment. This would be the greatest catch of all time. My heart is in my mouth. I don’t know if he can make it. The ball arcs and descends. My head snaps up, then down. It’s going to be inside the boundary. Jeffrey Lu leaps and lunges. Full length, he snatches at the ball. Has he got it? I jump up. I think, Yes! No! It skittles out of his hands as he lands. The ball trickles over the line. It’s four runs. He had it. He had it! I can hear the disappointment of the crowd from here. Jeffrey doesn’t sprawl for long. He scampers after it, throws it back with a glorious arc.

  Warwick Trent is furious. He rips off his cap, pelts it at the ground, and kicks at it like the enormous petulant arsehole that he is.

  “Fuck me, Cong!” he screams at Jeffrey, who trots back to where I stand, a grass stain under his knee. “You’re fuckin useless. I tole you to get fine! Now stay there! Fucksake!”

  He barks and waves. As though Jeffrey is a disobedient sheepdog. Then he turns with his arms folded, shaking his head.

  “Tough chance,” I say carefully.

  “Yair. Damn!” Jeffrey trots back, grimacing. He punches his palm. “I had it, Chuck. It just spilled out.”

  “It would have been some catch.” I try to smile, but I’m so disappointed for him.

  “I know. I was so close. I had it.” Jeffrey holds his hand aloft, like it has betrayed him. “And this guy, Trent, he has to be clinically retarded if he thinks he told me to get fine. He told me the opposite, the big bloated fucking ape. It was me that moved fine, because I knew what would happen. If I had have been where he put me, I wouldn’t have even got a hand on it.” Jeffrey hangs his hands on his hips.

  “I wouldn’t just say clinically retarded,” I muse. “I’m pretty sure he’s officially brain-dead. Or fully lobotomized. You know how cockroaches can still live for a while without a head? I think he’s got a similar sort of thing.”

  “Chickens too.”

  “Right. Chickens.”

  “Apparently there was a chicken in my ma’s village that lived for a full year after they lopped its head off with an axe. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Bullshit,” I say.

  “Are you calling my ma a liar?”

  “No. I’m calling you a liar. You can’t be trusted. How is she, anyway?” I ask after a pause.

  “Yeah, you know, she’s doing okay. You should have seen the blister on her neck when it burst. Disgusting, Chuck. It was all pink and wet. But she’s all right now. My dad is having a bit of a rough time at the moment, though. He’s all quiet and weird. More than usual.”

  “Really? Because of the war and everything?”

  “No, it’s not that. I think there are some people got laid off at the mine before Christmas, and even though that’s got absolutely nothing to do with him, people are harassing my dad about it all the time, because he’s only allowed here through some sponsorship with the mine, blah blah blah. Like he’s a Bond villain and it’s all somehow part of his plan for world domination.”

  I’m on the cusp of replying when a full-length ball sneaks under the bat of the Spider Monkey, skittling his wicket. The crowd cheers, and Jeffrey pounces in to celebrate. I sit down as drinks are brought onto the ground. I observe Jeffrey standing apart from the group, sucking at a plastic cup as the rest of the team forms a circle that excludes him.

  We don’t get to talk about An Lu again. For the rest of the innings we babble and ramble and ruminate like always. Jeffrey asks me if I would rather wear a hat made of spiders or have penises for fingers. After a lengthy
preamble which identifies the spiders as both poisonous and alive, I choose the penis-fingers. Then I wonder aloud how the earwig got its name. Jeffrey proposes that maybe it burrows into your brain through your ear canal and takes over your conscious being.

  “Is that what happened to you?” I ask him.

  Jeffrey declines comment on account of it being the end of the over. When he comes back, he clicks his fingers and points.

  “Got one for you, Chuck. Now. Think about this carefully. Did the dung beetle invent the wheel?”

  “Interesting proposition,” I admit. “Although technically a ball of dung is a sphere, and a sphere is not a wheel.”

  “So the question really is whether a sphere is a wheel,” Jeffrey says with his finger on his cheek.

  “No, the question is, who came first: the beetle or the Cheeses?”

  Jeffrey laughs.

  “You’re saying Cheeses Christ invented the wheel?”

  “Only the big wheel you’re standing on right now. A wheel we call earth. He also gave birth to the cheese wheel. Not literally, of course, but it’s a symbol of respect. Take a cheese wheel to the Vatican and see if they don’t bow and drool in reverence. But it has to be Swiss cheese.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s holey.”

  “Oh, fuck off!” Jeffrey groans, then scoots away for the end of another over.

  The heat drills down as the innings plays itself out. Blackburn begin to score well with the old ball, turning over the strike effortlessly, punctuating their control with occasional lofted boundaries. It’s obvious that Corrigan should bowl-spin to try to choke them up, but no matter how often Jeffrey warms up his arms to suggest he’s ready and willing, Warwick Trent doesn’t relent. In fact, with six overs to go, the repellent turd brings himself on to bowl, and almost every delivery is hit to the ropes. I shake my head, angry and disappointed. This was Jeffrey’s chance. He could have made his mark. He slipped into the team through a fluke and they’re not even going to use him. He may as well have been carrying the drinks.

  And so, at the close of the first innings, Corrigan are chasing a hefty target. I can feel my skin baking brown. The players start shuffling toward the pavilion, knowing they’ve got work to do.

  “Let me know where you’re batting,” I say, even though I know exactly where he’ll be listed.

  “Will do,” says Jeffrey, about to jog away. Then he looks over my shoulder and grins. “Let me know where you’re batting.”

  “What does that even mean?” I say, and then I follow his gaze.

  Eliza Wishart is sitting at the top of the hill behind me, under the shade of a Moreton Bay fig tree. She offers a small smile and a wave, which I return. Shit. I hope she hasn’t heard any of our rubbish. I suddenly feel as though I weigh twice as much as Warwick Trent. I whip back around to face Jeffrey. He grins.

  “Sassytime, Chuck!” He laughs and runs off, his legs like stilts.

  “G’luck,” I mumble after him, then turn slowly.

  I try to compose myself. I look down. I’m not sure if my legs will get me up the hill. I’m unprepared. I’m panicking. I need to think of a witty gambit.

  In the end, I’m propelled forward after I see a bee behind me. I take the steep steps toward Eliza, wiping the sweat from my brow. It feels like my entire body has sunk down to fill my feet, leaving my head completely vacant.

  “Hello, Charlie!” she says. I’ve thought so often of her voice these past couple of weeks that I’m a little stunned to hear it. It makes my spine chime like a tuning fork.

  “Hello,” I say. I’m standing awkwardly. Should I sit? I should probably sit. But where? Am I permitted? I’m not sure if my legs will bend, anyway.

  “Come sit down,” she says, and pats the grass right beside her and shuffles slightly.

  “Sure.”

  The first thing I notice is how thin she is. She looks almost brittle now. Delicate. Her skin like a china doll’s. Her hair is uncannily close to Audrey Hepburn’s. And she appears to be speaking differently. A little cleaner and crisper with her consonants. Proper. It’s almost a British inflection, but not quite.

  I sit down. She smells incredible. Amazing. I don’t know how anybody could smell like this. Every morning, she must soak in a bath of lavender and rose petals and other assorted girlspices, then spray herself liberally with a silver atomizer filled with the finest perfume ever prepared. Probably by somebody French. I don’t know. Either way, it makes me queasy and nervous, and the sudden image of her soaking in a bath has me blushing and looking away.

  Damn. I think of a witty opening line, a full minute after I needed it. I should have said, May I have your autograph, Miss Hepburn? And then sat down casually as she laughed. No, actually, that would have been stupid. Don’t say anything. That’s Mark Twain’s advice. It’s better to shut up and appear stupid than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

  So we sit in silence. Parts of the alphabet whirl and slat across my brain like sleet, refusing to form any kind of meaningful sentences. Eliza leans back on her hands. Relaxed and perfect. A paperback in her lap, fanning out from the shallow gully between her legs.

  “What are you reading?”

  She holds up her book.

  I read the title out loud: “Franny and Zooey.”

  “I quite like it,” she says, “though I’m not too far in. Have you read it?”

  I wish I could say I have. I shake my head.

  “New York, Charlie. Imagine it. Wouldn’t it be a dream? Doesn’t it just sound like the whole world has been packed into one city?”

  “Well, we’re going to be living there soon enough, aren’t we? High tea at the Plaza Hotel and so on?”

  She looks at me like I’ve just mumbled something in Ukrainian. I panic. Did I imagine that whole conversation? But then she remembers and laughs, and my heart resumes beating.

  “Of course! How could I forget?”

  “You almost stood me up,” I say.

  “That would have been tragic,” she says, still smiling. “I would have remembered too late, and then I would have turned up breathless at the Plaza to find our table empty. The waiter would have told me that you had arrived and left already. So I would have followed you back to Brooklyn, searching everywhere, only to finally see you linking arms with some other young belle in a fur coat and a pillbox hat.”

  “Oh, no. That wouldn’t happen,” I mumble, then blush and look down. Where is my wit? I am witless. Has my head been infected by an earwig? It’s never like this when I daydream this scene. I would have quickly quipped something about the importance of being punctual, about my eligible bachelorship and the slew of society girls waiting to make my acquaintance.

  “Oh really? And why is that, Mr. Bucktin?”

  “Because I would have waited. All day. Until they closed.”

  And now she blushes a little, because I’ve delivered the verbal equivalent of an awkward kiss.

  We both look away, out across the oval, just as the game recommences. The Blackburn side run out as a single white cluster, looking confident and intimidating. Their opening bowler is enormous. He looks old enough to have fought in Gallipoli. And he looks angry about it too. He has to be the world’s only prematurely balding teenager. Either that or he’s swapped birth certificates with one of his children.

  The innings starts badly for Corrigan, but brilliantly for me. Warwick Trent is bowled early without troubling the scorers. I almost celebrate his wicket loudly from the sidelines. I’m filled with a spiteful glee as he trudges off the field, slapping at his pads with his bat.

  The scoring is slow. I look over to Jeffrey, who sits cross-legged a few meters away from the rest of the team, his kitbag closed behind him. It doesn’t look like he’ll be in anytime soon.

  Eliza tells me she likes my shirt. She touches my rolled-up sleeve, which transmits a shiver up my spine.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I like your, you know, dress.”

  She laughs and thanks m
e back.

  I ask softly:

  “So how is your family? And how are you doing with everything?”

  Eliza picks at the cover of her book. She shrugs and speaks with that accent.

  “It’s all about the same, I guess. But it’s all a little less … I don’t know, urgent. It’s very strange. And sad. Nobody knows what to do. My mother is a mess. You know, Charlie, we still can’t sit down and eat at the table without her noticing Laura’s empty chair and just bursting into tears.”

  “That’s awful,” I say.

  “Yeah. And yet my dad is completely different. First he just refused to admit she’d gone missing. Now it’s as though he never had another daughter. He’s blocked it all out. He’s blocked everything out, really. Which must be easy when you’re drunk all the time.”

  She says this last part very quietly. Maybe she doesn’t wish to talk about it anymore. But she goes on.

  “Christmas was the hardest, of course. All my cousins and aunties and uncles were being so careful and polite. But you could see that everybody was avoiding it. My mother had already bought presents for Laura before she went missing, and so she just wrapped them all up and gave them to me. Then she said that I will have to share them with Laura when she comes back.”

  And then Eliza starts to cry. I freeze. Her face slowly creases, there’s a moment where she is struggling to control it, but then it’s unstoppable. Another wicket falls. There is consternation everywhere. Chaos. My mouth is open. I have no idea what to do. Why did I have to ask about all this? Why did I have to invite all this sadness to the surface? I feel utterly responsible. It’s hard for me to watch. Her face reddens. Her cheeks are enameled with tears. And I know I can’t help noticing her dimples make her even more beautiful.

  I want to go back in time, back to that night. I want to make this all right. I want someone to tell me what to do right now. Should I place my hand on her shoulder? Or should I pull her to me like I want to, hold her close?

  I remember. I have a handkerchief, I think. I pat my pockets. Yes. I hope it’s clean. Please be clean. It is. I am useful. I hand it to her.

  “Thanks, Charlie,” Eliza says, and gives a short smile. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose. Her mouth is still turned down. Her hands fall heavily to her lap.