Reluctant Hallelujah

by Gabrielle Williams

  Shit.

  Sydney has prettiness in spades. The harbor and the bridge and the ferries and the terraces and the steep streets and the parklands butting right up to the water. Sydney is stunning.

  But that morning, Sydney made me nervous. Even though we’d made good time, there was still a big unknown ahead of us.

  Coco was quiet as we stood on the deck, hungover, waiting for Judd to moor the boat at the sailing club near Luna Park. None of us mentioned the night before, but Judd and Pirate were acting a bit weird towards us. There was no doubt they were looking at Jesus with a lot more interest than they’d mustered up till then. Up till then He’d been this sick guy who didn’t offer much in the way of conversation. But now he was a sheee-crett.

  In an effort to seem normal, couldn’t-care-less-ish, I asked Taxi exactly where in Lavender Bay we were supposed to be meeting whoever it was we were meeting.

  ‘Wendy Whiteley’s Garden,’ he said.

  I frowned at him.

  ‘Wendy Whiteley as in Brett Whiteley the artist? His widow?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘Is she part of it?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘At least, I don’t think so.’

  Judd held each of our elbows as we stepped from boat to land. It felt strange stepping onto a flat, unmoving surface, my knees feeling woozy at the very solidness of it all. Coco kept a distance between herself and Judd. But Judd seemed to be less interested in her than he was in Jesus.

  Enron, Taxi and Jones helped lift Jesus off the boat and I kept an eye on Judd and Pirate, who were both watching closely. And let me tell you. When you’re trying to keep such an iconic figure as Jesus secret, it doesn’t work if anyone pays too close attention. Judd’s eyebrows rose, and I saw him glancing at Pirate to see if he’d seen what Judd had just seen.

  I took the handles of the chair and started pushing Jesus along, away from the boat, away from Judd and Pirate.

  ‘See ya,’ I called out to them. ‘Thanks heaps. It was brilliant of you to give us a lift. Thanks a lot. Thanks. See ya. Bye. Thanks.’

  Trying to get them to look at me, but I was of no interest at all. The Guy in the wheelchair was getting all the attention.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ Coco said, quietly.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, putting my arm around her and bringing her close to me. ‘They thought you were drunk and talking crap.’

  ‘You think so?’ she asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ I said. Nup.

  ‘Is it weird that I’m going to miss Him?’ she asked me. ‘Once we drop Him with the new guys. Is that weird?’

  I grinned at her and shook my head. She put her arm around my shoulder and the two of us walked Jesus Christ around Lavender Bay to Wendy Whiteley’s garden.

  Wendy Whiteley’s Garden isn’t hers.

  ‘That must be Wendy’s house just there,’ Taxi said, pointing up at the beautiful, white, gabled house that overlooked the park that tumbled all the way down to the water. We’d deliberately taken the long way around because the Mover had told Taxi we needed to see it from above to get the real beauty of it. And after all the rushing and driving and tick-tock of the past few days, we finally had time.

  ‘This used to be old railway yards, just disused land,’ Taxi explained. ‘And one day Wendy decided she was going to fix it up. Brett had died, and her daughter Arkie had died, and she probably needed to do something to take her mind away from all the sad stuff. So she started clearing it. Planting stuff. It wasn’t her land or anything, but she just started working on it.’

  ‘So she’s done all this work,’ I said, ‘and it isn’t even hers?’

  Taxi nodded.

  ‘Which is probably the most brilliant thing about it,’ he said. ‘Like those ice sculptures or drawing a pattern in the sand. She did it for the pleasure of it. The Mover described it to me last week, but I had no idea it would be this beautiful.’

  It was beautiful, he was right. Soulful. Real. Not a fake park manufactured by a council with walking paths and play equipment. This was a real piece of garden. Leafy, green and lush, but also cliffy and steep, with paths crossing along the face of it. Going down would be easy but coming back was going to be a bit more hard work.

  I could hear my dad, chiding me, ‘You’re young and fit. The walk up isn’t going to kill you.’

  I smiled to myself.

  A big-lipped sculpture of a woman’s face stood sentry up the top. A stone plinth was to the left of the big-lipped woman, with writing down it that went like this:

  & we shall walk & talk

  In gardens all misty & wet with rain

  & we shall never never

  Grow so old again

  Appropriate, because it was raining and misty. As if someone was squirting from a nozzle adjusted to ‘spray’.

  The boats in the harbour were turned with the wind, pretending not to see us. As if they were all in agreement that if they looked in the opposite direction, we would be safe doing what we were here to do. We walked down the uneven sandy paths, the ground slippery, pushing Jesus in His wheelchair. Luna Park leered from the distance, the flashing lights and garish noises keeping people’s attention focused away from us. As we moved along the paths, we passed sculptures made out of old gardening tools, railway equipment, rusted nails, random bits and pieces that Wendy had found as she’d tilled the soil.

  At the bottom of the path was a Visitors’ Book, open, the misty rain smudging the pages.

  Thanks Wendy for this beautiful garden, someone had written.

  Another had written, simply, stunning.

  Someone else had written, James is funny. ROFL.

  A gardener whistled to himself as he worked over near the large tree. When he saw us he downed tools, straightened up and walked over, a broad grin on his face.

  ‘You made it,’ he said simply.

  Taxi stepped forwards.

  ‘I’m Taxi.’

  The two of them shook hands.

  ‘I’m Peter,’ the gardener replied. ‘You right for the next leg?’

  Taxi nodded.

  I slid a glance at Jones. A frown chipped his forehead. He stepped forwards and touched Taxi on the shoulder.

  ‘What’s going on, mate?’ Jones asked.

  Taxi turned towards him, and slung his arm across Jones’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m going,’ Taxi said. ‘This is me.’

  And he nodded towards a boat that was bobbing at the wharf, ‘Mover’s Tours’ written across it in big white letters.

  Jones grinned, a big fuck-off-you’re-kidding grin. But underlying the grin, I noticed a slight tremor at the corner of his lip. A you’re-not-kidding-are-you tremble.

  ‘But, so … well, I’ll come too,’ said Jones. ‘I think I can squeeze a boat trip into my busy schedule.’

  And something about the way he said it made my eyes bubble like the water-fountain at school.

  Taxi shook his head.

  ‘No, mate. This is me.’

  As if that’s all the explanation it required.

  And in a way, it was. There was nothing else to say. Taxi was going, Jones wasn’t. Peter went to wheel Jesus onto the boat.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, stepping in front of the wheelchair to stop Peter going any further. I took Taxi’s mobile from him. ‘Can you take our photo?’

  We all stood in a group, Taxi holding the handles, Jones beside him, me beside Jones, Enron and Coco on the other side.

  ‘Say Jesus,’ I called.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Say hallelujah,’ said Enron, laughing.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ we all cheered.

  Peter snapped, the click and whir of the phone signalling when each photo was taken. We looked over his shoulder at photos of five teenagers and one Dead Guy, just finished one helluva roadtrip, each of us grinning like idiots, as if this was the happiest day of our lives.

  ‘Send us the photos,’ I said to Taxi. ‘Email them.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll Facebook them,’ he said. ‘You’ve got Facebook, I’m pretty sure,’ he said to Coco. She tilted her chin at him.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  He laughed, and then turned to Jones, folding him inside a hug, before giving him a small something that you wouldn’t have even known he was holding until he revealed it.

  A small green gem-like stone. His brother Marco.

  ‘I’ll be back for this,’ Taxi said to Jones. ‘You keep it safe.’

  Jones looked down at the stone in his open palm, then closed his fingers over it and jammed his hand into his pocket.

  The rest of us gave Taxi a hug, and then the four of us – Enron, Coco, Jones and I – each put our arms around Jesus. I don’t know what the other three said to Him, but I simply whispered ‘amen’. I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it, but it seemed to describe what I wanted to say.

  We watched Taxi, Peter and Jesus get on board the boat and head for the next leg. As the boat churned off into the harbour, the sails of the other boats provided camouflage, until after a time, we couldn’t make out which boat was ours.

  And not one of us had said a single word.

  The misty rain was still spritzing the leaves as we headed back through Wendy’s Garden.

  Enron walked in front, his shoulders hunched up around his ears in counterbalance to his hands, which were plunged into his pockets. Coco walked beside him, her arm looped through his, talking to him about plans and stories and next-steps.

  ‘We’ll just say we don’t remember anything … Someone’s brainwashed us not to know what happened … found ourselves here and don’t know how we got here … We were drugged … woke up …’

  Jones and I walked together behind them.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.

  He nodded, but kept chewing the corner of his mouth, his teeth creating an extra-cushiony puff on his bottom lip.

  ‘Are you angry with him?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. No. Not really. Jealous maybe. There I was, last night, saying I was ready for an adventure, and then today, there he goes, and I’m staying put.’

  ‘There are worse things than staying put,’ I said.

  Meaning me. He looked down at me through the fringe of his eyelashes.

  ‘If you’d gone away with them, I wouldn’t have anyone to come visit me in jail,’ I joked.

  Even though I was scared that was really true.

  ‘I’m going to be pretty busy,’ he said. ‘And I’m not sure about mixing with you criminal types.’

  He pulled out a ciggie and stuck it in his mouth, plugging the grin that was lurking.

  I really was scared about going to prison. I wondered what it would be like. Would all the women there be hardcore? Would they all be tough and brittle and vicious?

  ‘You know how you said the other night that you kind of understood what my mum meant,’ I said to Jones, the wet leaf-litter sticking to the soles of my shoes, ‘about sometimes a thing being bigger than a single person? That it was kind of a privilege to go down for a bigger cause? That if that happened to you, you were lucky? Remember?’

  ‘I was stoned. And I’m an arsehole when I’m stoned. You’re not going to jail.’

  I stopped him in the path where he was walking and faced up to him.

  ‘You know what? I might be. I really might. And I kind of think that’s okay. I mean, it’s not my favourite option, but if that’s the way it’s meant to be, that’s it.’

  It was a relief to wash the worry away from me. If I went to jail, so what? What was the worst thing that could happen? Aside from a few gruesome dykes trying to kiss me, it wouldn’t be so bad. Three meals a day. I could do uni in there. Have plenty of free time to study. Once you got used to the idea, it was kind of okay. Might get out in twenty years.

  ‘Jones,’ I said, the weight of the thing pressing on my forehead, ‘we have to call the police now. We can’t just go back to Melbourne and turn up and say “Hi, what’s news?” There’s no point pretending it’s all going to work out fine, because we both know it isn’t.’

  I looked up ahead at Coco, trying to convince Enron they could sort out a story.

  ‘Just tell them Enron did it,’ Jones said. ‘He’s always seemed pretty dodge to me.’

  And then he laughed because we both knew I wouldn’t do that. If it was a choice between saying I did it, or putting Enron in it, I was going to put my own hand up and never look back.

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ he said to me quietly. ‘You just have to have faith.’

  There are all kinds of strange sculptures in Wendy’s Garden, some made out of old pieces of machinery, some of them hewn from blocks of wood, but each piece beautiful and exactly right in this tumble of plants and leaves. Jones picked up a chock of wood that lay beside a freshly carved sculpture. The piece he picked up wasn’t much bigger than his hand. A souvenir.

  ‘Finished my last one,’ and he tucked the chock of wood into his backpack that he had slung over his shoulder. ‘Need something new to work on.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’d finished.’

  He pulled a perfectly carved person out of his backpack. He was lovely. A little guy wearing sunglasses and His hair tied back in a ponytail and hobo gloves on each of His little hands.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Absolutely perfect.’

  ‘Piss off,’ he said, slapping my compliment away with his hand. ‘It’s nowhere near perfect and it needs to be sandpapered, and it could have done with someone who knew what they were doing but eh, whatcha gonna do?’

  He put the little guy down among the fronds, and stepped back.

  ‘It looks gorgeous,’ I said.

  He slapped his heavy whittling knife against his thigh.

  ‘It looks crap.’

  ‘It looks fantastic, and you know it. Stop fishing for compliments.’

  He held the point of the knife up to my chin.

  ‘More compliments,’ he said. ‘Give me more.’

  I laughed and pushed his hand away.

  ‘A compliment?’ I said. ‘How about, I don’t think you brushed your teeth this morning.’

  He put the blade back up to my neck.

  ‘What. Did. You. Say?’ he said, a mock threat coming into his voice as he stood over me.

  ‘I said … um, I think your breath smells like a flower.’

  ‘What kind of flower?’ he said, the smile in his eyes betraying the angry tone of his voice.

  ‘Um, a, how about, a forget-me-not?’

  My dad planted forget-me-nots with me when I was little. My one and only time gardening. And I didn’t want Jones to forget-me-ever.

  ‘What does a forget-me-not smell like?’

  ‘Like me and you, mingled all together.’

  And then a voice split the air, shaking the leaves with its timbre.

  ‘Put the knife down,’ the voice said. A real-life voice, but without a body attached to it.

  Jones and I looked around, and for a moment I thought it was God Himself talking to us. Truly, I thought it was. Stranger things had happened over the past three days, and it’s not often a girl gets to say that. But it wasn’t God. It was a lot more prosaic than that.

  At the top of Wendy’s Garden was a police car, its nose pointed down at us as if we’d been sniffed out. One policeman was holding a loud-hailer, while the other policeman was aiming his gun.

  At us.

  I looked back at Jones, the whittling knife at my chin. And then I realised how it must look from the police’s point of view. The police at the top of the garden had repackaged our story to have a new villain.

  Not Enron.

  Not me.

  Jones.

  And Jones realised it as well.

  He started screaming at me like some crazy person.

  ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m gonna kill you, you’re dead, you’re dead.’

  I could feel, rather than see, Coco and Enron tu
rning around.

  ‘Jones,’ I heard Coco calling out.

  ‘Mate, what’re you doing?’ from Enron.

  ‘Jones,’ I cried out, and then I started sobbing. ‘Seb.’ Fright bringing my hands up protectively around my own body. ‘Seb Seb Seb.’

  He pushed me in the chest, making me stumble, and as I fell backwards he lunged at me with the knife, a faux-lunge that wouldn’t have gone anywhere. He was pulling his lunge, but if you were standing at the top of the garden looking down, you would have misinterpreted it.

  An electric crack whipped the air behind me, whistling past my ear, and Jones jerked as if his strings had been pulled, a red inkblot seeping onto the front of his shirt like litmus paper.

  I started to lift myself up. Pushing myself off the ground so I could get to Jones. Stop anything bad from happening to him. I needed to show the police that they had it all wrong. That he’d just been mucking around with the knife. That he hadn’t been threatening me. He’d been asking for compliments. That was all. It had been a joke. I’d said his breath smelt. Like forget-me-nots.

  And as I went to stand, Jones fell back in slow motion, his arms flung out either side of him, his chest pushed inwards from the force of the shots.

  In May, Taxi came back from wherever he’d been and looked Coco and Enron and me up. We were easy to find, seeing as our names had been printed in every newspaper around Australia.

  He came round to our house and Mum and Dad gave him the strongest, hardest, toughest, most constricting hug they both could squeeze into him.

  ‘Thank you,’ they said.

  We sat in our crappy old lounge room. Everything looked ugly to me. I knew I should be seeing beauty and bigger-than-us everywhere, but instead, even the house I loved was tatty and oppressive. And I was angry at it. I was angry at the house. Angry at a bricks and mortar structure; go figure. Because if this house hadn’t kept Jesus underground for so many years, I wouldn’t have gone into the drains, and I wouldn’t have met Jones and he wouldn’t be dead.

  There wasn’t even a word in the dictionary to describe the way I felt. And I should know, I’d looked through the whole thing. The only ones that came close were maybe, ‘devastated’ or ‘overwrought’ or ‘sepulchral’.