by Pat Flynn
How could anyone have found out? It certainly hadn’t come from him. He hadn’t told anyone, even Jimmy.
The twins didn’t answer. They were starting to fidget, uncomfortable in the presence of this crazy boy almost yelling at them.
“Who told you that about Becky?” Now he was yelling.
The twins looked at each other and ran away.
Alex walked over to Jimmy. “Who started these rumours about becky?” he demanded.
Jimmy looked doubtful.
“It’s not worth it, mate.”
“WHO STARTED THEM?”
“Don’t do anything stupid ...”
“WHO?”
“Billy Johnstone.” Jimmy sighed. “Adrian Dorry told me that Billy knows a girl who went to Becky’s old school in Brisbane. She told him on the weekend, and he’s been telling everybody since.”
Before Jimmy could stop him Alex took off. Kids who had kept half an eye on proceedings followed him excitedly. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was heading. Everyone knew Billy and his group would be down behind the trees in the corner of the school.
When Alex arrived he had trouble spotting Billy through the smoke. But when he saw him leaning on the fence, his arm around Claire Carney (she must not have got around to dumping him yet), Alex didn’t hesitate.
“You’re a bastard,” he said, planting himself close enough to Billy to seriously invade his personal space.
Billy automatically puffed up his shoulders and chest. He’s bigger than half the guys at Chief’s gym.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I got a dad, and he ain’t in jail.”
Some kids laughed.
That was more than enough of an excuse for Alex. He flew at Billy, too angry to worry about strategy, throwing every combination of punches imaginable. Jab, jab, left, right, left. He had quick hands from the hours he had spent with his dad in the ring as a young kid, and the training was coming back to him instinctively. With the adrenalin pumping inside of him he felt invincible.
He must have landed a good left–right combination because the cut on Billy’s lip, still healing from a few weeks ago, split open. Alex was looking at the blood oozing out of it, and it made him feel good. It felt good to hurt Billy, the boy who hurt Becky. It felt good to be teaching Billy a lesson in front of all these people. He was teaching everyone a lesson. Treat Alex Jackson or his friends like crap and you’ll pay the price.
Suddenly, before he had time to move, Billy reached out and grabbed him. Billy’s hands enveloped Alex’s biceps and lifted him clean up off the ground, as if he was made of helium. Alex’s legs flailed and kicked at air, powerless to stop Billy. He knew he was stuffed.
For an instant he met Billy’s eyes, mere centimetres from his face, and realised he’d taught this brute nothing.
Billy chucked him at the fence. Maybe it was the fact that Alex’s head had taken one too many whacks getting slammed skateboarding, or maybe it was simply that the post his head hit at a rate of knots was made of steel. But his head rebelled. Big time.
Alex floated outside of himself, as if he was suddenly a detached observer. He could actually see his own body lying on the ground, his split head beginning to drip blood, turning his blond hair red. I’ll look like Jimmy.
He felt his uncontrollable anger of a few moments ago gently slip away, and things started becoming peaceful. He remembered that he used to think life was simple and wondered how a thirteen–year–old skate–grom had got himself into such a mess. And then he didn’t remember any more ...
CHAPTER 19
Dr Mum
When he woke up Alex noticed that Becky wasn’t in the room. His mum and dad, Sam and Jimmy were there, and even Mandy — probably to keep Sam company — but no Becky.
“What’d I get?” Alex mumbled towards Jimmy, tentatively touching the humungous bandage wrapped around his head. He felt like an Egyptian mummy.
“What’s that, love?” his mum asked. “Quick dear,” she said to Sam, “go tell the doctor that he’s woken up.”
“Jimmy, what’d Letch give me?”
“Umm, not sure,” answered Jimmy. It probably wasn’t a good idea to be discussing school punishments with a barely conscious kid and his worried family, but this was Jimmy, and he couldn’t help himself. “I rang up Adrian Dorry earlier and he said that Billy got the rest of the week off for fighting. He reckons you’ll get the same.”
“Suspension?”
“Yep.”
“Mum’ll kill me.”
“I’m right here, Alex, and I won’t kill you,” said Sharon Jackson calmly. “I just want you to get better. The doctor said that you have a mild concussion. He said that he hasn’t seen such a bruised and battered head for someone so young in a long time.
“It doesn’t beat my head, though,” Chief piped up. “They had to invent a new shape to describe it. It’s called a Chiefagon.”
“When I’m better, Mum, will you kill me then?”
“Probably. But let’s worry about that when you’re better.”
Alex looked around and guessed he was in the emergency room at the Logan Hospital. The sign on the wall that said so made him pretty sure he was right. He still wasn’t totally with it, like he was living in a dream.
The doctor came in and entertained the family with a well–rehearsed routine of head jokes (“you really used your noggin this time, hey Alex?”) He explained that Alex would have to stay overnight as a precaution, but that he should be able to go home tomorrow. He also suggested that, for a while, Alex only skateboard on grass. The surface, that is, not the drug.
Chief drove Jimmy and the girls home, but before Jimmy left, Alex asked him about Becky. Jimmy hadn’t seen her. Apparently while Alex was fighting Billy she had ran away from school. “Adrian Dorry reckons that, due to her circumstances and everything, Letch’ll let her off with a warning.”
Alex lay back in bed and wondered what the chances were of him getting out of this room without a lecture from Dr Mum. He thought about the time he “borrowed” twenty bucks out of Sam’s moneybox to buy some new wheel bearings for his skateboard. His mum had made him feel so guilty that he not only paid Sam back in installments from his pocket money, but he also wrote an apology letter to his grandma, who had given Sam the money for her ninth birthday. Not good.
He looked over at his mum, who was unusually quiet, and was surprised to see tears running down her cheeks. He had only seen her cry twice before, both times at funerals. Alex reached over and took her hand.
“No one’s dead, Mum.”
“I was really worried about you,” she said, finally.
“Well, you don’t have to worry now.”
“You know what I was thinking about when you were lying there unconscious?”
“No, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me.”
“I was thinking that I hardly know you anymore.”
It made Alex feel bad to hear her say that. “Of course you do, Mum. You know I hate brussel sprouts.”
“I’m not talking about stuff like that. I’m talking about ... remember when you used to get home from school and tell me everything that happened? You’d tell me how Sarah Sceney told the teacher that she loved you. What funny and crazy things Jimmy said in class. Now ...”
“Mum, that was years ago. I was in Year 5!”
“Now, you’re getting into fights, and I don’t know why. I had to call George Letcher the other week and tell him you were scared of this big kid, Billy somebody, but that’s all I know because you won’t tell me.”
“Billy Johnstone.” Now I know who tipped Letch off.
“I even hear you’ve got a girlfriend now ... Beattie?”
“Becky.”
She sighed. “I guess it’s normal. Now you’re growing up you’ll want your own space. It’s just that, I miss our talks. I miss knowing you like I used to ...”
She started crying again.
Everybody I know is cracking up!
“Mum, I promi
se I’ll tell you everything. But just not now, okay? You heard the doctor, I need my rest.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “I think you’re a rad Mum, you know that.”
CHAPTER 20
Getting D and M with Chief
When Alex got home the next day he was feeling better. The huge bandage was replaced with a lighter one, and the cut on the side of his head wasn’t nearly as sore as yesterday. When the nurse was changing the bandage Alex asked if he could look in the mirror so he could see what his brains looked like through the split in his head. The nurse just laughed and asked, “Did you say mirror or microscope?”
Sam had made a poster which she stuck on the wall in Alex’s room. It said, “My Brother is a Crackhead!”, and had a picture of a broken head being glued back together by dogs dressed up as doctors. While Alex was laughing at his sister’s warped sense of humour the phone rang. It was Letch. He asked how Alex was feeling and then let him know that he needn’t bother coming back to school for the rest of the week as he was on a four–day suspension for fighting.
Before he hung up Alex mustered up as much courage as he could and asked Letch about Becky.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss other students,” Letch said, more softly than Alex had heard him speak before, “but I hope you get a chance to talk to her before ...” He paused. “I know why you fought Billy. I have sympathy for the fact that you were standing up for the reputation of another student. Nevertheless, fighting is fighting, and that’s why you’re suspended.”
A chance to talk to Becky before what?
“Can we still hold the skateboarding demonstration next Friday?” Alex asked.
“I don’t see why not. That is, if your head’s better by then.”
I can’t promise that.
At 2 o’clock Sharon Jackson got a call to say she was needed at work, so she decided to drop Alex off at the gym. Chief spent the afternoons there doing general maintenance and setting up the equipment before the night’s training session. He always made sure he finished in time to meet Alex and Sam at home after school, before returning to the gym to train the boys. Alex noticed his mum having a quiet word to Chief as she was leaving. She looked serious.
Alex helped lay out the skipping ropes and exercise mats and then worked the stopwatch as Chief went a few rounds with the heavy bag. Alex couldn’t help but admire his dad as he watched him work out. Chief may have been over 40 but he was in great shape. He got up at 5.30 every morning to jump rope and do push–ups and sit–ups, and he always went a few rounds in the afternoon with the heavy bag.
After three, three–minute rounds, Chief asked Alex to sit inside the ring as he wanted to talk to him. The sweat was glistening off his arms and chest as he stretched his hamstrings on the top rope, delaying the moment as long as possible.
“Your mum asked me to have a talk to you about fighting ...” Chief said.
Having heart to hearts was right up his mum’s alley, but Alex rarely heard the Chief give it a go. He wasn’t much of a talker, though he was good at comic relief. He was more of an action man.
“It’s hard for me to tell you that what you did is wrong,” he said. “When I was a young fella, no one got into more fights than me. I remember this one time, before I met your mum, I took on three bouncers outside the Kingston Hotel. I didn’t fare too badly, either.”
“Dad, I don’t think this is what Mum had in mind.”
“Yeah, I know. But what I’m getting to is that for every fight I got into, I had a reason. I never thought I was a nutcase who’d fight for the fun of it, though some people might have disagreed. I’d only fight if someone abused me, or abused my girlfriend, or abused my mate or his girlfriend ...”
He looked like he was losing his train of thought. “So you’re saying it’s okay to fight if there’s a reason?” asked Alex.
“I’ll tell you a story. One day, when I first started going out with your mum, I got into a fight at the pub with this bloke who called your mum a rude name when she turned him down for a dance. He was just a bloke who’d had too much to drink, but I didn’t like what he said to Sharon so I decked him.”
Chief swung a right hook to show how he’d done it all those years ago. “I thought your Mother would be pleased that I’d stood up for her, but she was dirty on me like I couldn’t believe. She asked me what I thought I was doing? I was showing a bloke that he can’t talk to a woman like that, I told her. ‘You think you taught him something about how to treat people?’ she said, ‘by knocking him out? You taught him something all right, but it’s not what you think.’
That got me thinking about all the times I was beaten up. All I learnt from getting my backside kicked was that I had to develop a better left hook.” He chuckled. “And I thought, ‘I wonder if any of the blokes I’ve smacked over the years changed even the slightest bit as a result of getting hurt?’ Did I really think that punching that loser who gave your mum lip would help him learn something? I knew that it wouldn’t. I probably knew it all the time. Your mum helped me realise that I fought mainly ’cause I liked it. I was good at it. It made me feel like a man to know people were scared of me.”
Chief paused, and then his voice became quiet. “That was the last fight I ever had. I tell my boys the same thing. Boxing, it’s a sport, and for some of these kids it’s a good sport because it keeps ’em off the street. But fighting, that’s an attitude. It’s wrong.”
For one of his first ever father/son deep and meaningfuls, Alex thought Chief did pretty well.
CHAPTER 21
Becky’s Secret
Friday came and Alex was bored from sitting at home all week, even looking forward to Sam getting home from school so he had someone to muck around with. He had talked to Jimmy a few times to find out the news from school and it wasn’t good. Apparently Billy was seen as something of a hero for the way he had picked Alex up and chucked him into the fence. Jimmy did say, though, that Claire Carney didn’t like the way Billy had treated Becky, so she dumped him. Joel Foster asked Claire to go out with him the next day and she said yes.
The most worrying news was that Becky hadn’t been seen since Monday. No one, not Sarah Sceney or even Adrian Dorry, knew where she was or whether she was coming back to school. Peter Callaghan reckoned she was being sent to a boarding school in Alice Springs, but he was a totally unreliable source. For once Alex wished Sam was at St Joseph’s. If anyone could have found out it was her.
What Alex found ridiculous was that he didn’t even know Becky’s address or phone number. They had only been going out four weeks on Monday, though it felt like much longer. She obviously didn’t want anyone visiting or calling her at home and Alex hadn’t pushed her. But he never expected her to disappear off the face of the earth. She wasn’t in the phonebook so he called Telstra Information, but they told him she had an unlisted number. Why hasn’t she called me?
Alex went to his room, opened his underwear drawer (the one place Sam wouldn’t look) and fished out the last email Becky had sent him. Well, not him, exactly, but Juliette. He remembered how he’d felt when he first read it outside the train station. He knew then that Becky had problems in her life he could never fully understand. That didn’t scare him away, though, just the opposite. He wanted to protect Becky, to stop her from getting hurt any more than she already was. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t care. That she didn’t have to have a perfect life with a perfect family for him to like her. He never said this to her, of course. He didn’t say anything, just used the information she wrote for his own gain. Maybe if I had said something she wouldn’t have run away?
Alex had never prodded Becky with too many personal questions. He wanted to give her time. But he never counted on Billy Johnstone finding out and spreading the news all over the school (with the typical exaggerations and lies thrown in) before Becky told him what she had already told Juliette. And she would have told him, eventually, Alex was sure of that. At the station he could feel that Becky wanted to open up, but she wa
sn’t quite ready, so she kissed him instead. It must have been hard for Becky when Kirsten and Kerra Medhurst started asking questions about her dad in front of everyone at school. She would have thought that he, Alex, was hearing it all for the first time. Maybe that’s why she ran?
There were so many questions, and no one around to give any answers. The email in his hand was the only thing he had to remind him of Becky. The only evidence that she even existed.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Dear Julie,
I know what you mean about us becoming friends quickly. I feel like I’ve known you for two years, not two days.☺ I like writing to you, as I feel I can tell you anything.
You asked what happened to my Dad’s business. It’s a really sad story and I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about it. I can talk to Mum but she’s even more upset than me, so most of the time I try and cheer her up. I want to tell you what happened cause I’m sick of keeping it to myself, even though it’s pretty bad and you might think differently about me after you’ve read it☺ But I hope not.
My dad was really cool. He was always ☺ and used to buy Mum and me the best presents. We lived in a posh house with a pool and a tennis court, and Dad is a really good tennis player and he would give me lessons twice a week.
Then our life changed. One day last year a fat policeman knocked on our door and arrested Dad for fraud. Dad was a lawyer, and they say he stole $500,000 from the companies he worked for. He was found guilty and was sentenced to jail for five years. He also had to pay a $500,000 fine, so we had to sell our house and move to Beeton, a suburb of Logan City.
It makes me really ashamed to have to write that my dad is in jail. That sort of stuff happens to people in books and movies, but not to normal people like me, if you know what I mean. What annoys me is that my dad was always talking to me about honesty. When we played tennis he used to make me call the shot in if the ball was close to the line. Yet it was okay for him to cheat other people out of heaps of money. It doesn’t make sense.