On the Jellicoe Road

  “We passed Yass about half an hour ago.”

  I smile. Three years on and we’ve moved forward, past the town where the Brigadier found us.

  “If you weren’t driving, I’d kiss you senseless,” I tell him.

  He swerves to the side of the road and stops the car abruptly. “Not driving any more.”

  All I remember about the Sydney of my past is the last place we lived in near the Cross. At one stage we’re on a road with four lanes of traffic on each side, in the middle of morning peak-hour traffic. I see a Coca-Cola sign in the distance and I’m amazed at what comes flooding back.

  “We lived somewhere around here, to the left. Once we lived just behind that sign.”

  I’m impressed with Griggs’s ability to drive in the city. I feel claustrophobic and caged in. Drivers beep their horns impatiently and there are so many signs and arrows. We drive around for ages, trying to work out where to park the car. Everywhere we go there are parking meters. Griggs decides that we need to park the car in a quieter street just outside the city.

  “Do you know where?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t want to be seen too close to home. Everyone knows everyone.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Waterloo. About five minutes from here.”

  “Waterloo. Is it a tough place?”

  “No, but some people have tough lives. I’ll take you there one day.”

  “Turn left,” I tell him. “There have to be some streets down here without parking meters.”

  The car isn’t doing so well and I feel bad for Santangelo because he probably knew that a seven-hour trip would wipe it out but he let us have it all the same. Just thinking of him makes me think of Raffy and of how they would all be getting ready for school at the moment. I wonder what they’re thinking. I left a note saying that I’d be back in a couple of days and for a moment I miss them all: Raffy and Jessa and Ben, and even Mr. Palmer and poor Chloe P., and the other seniors of the House and the year tens, whose energy I love. I even miss Richard.

  After we finally find a car park, Griggs is pragmatic and goes into sergeant-major mode. I can tell that he’s already wound up tight. This is a world he can’t control the way he does the territory wars or the guys at his school.

  “We begin with people you remember, places you remember. Houses you lived in, corner shops. Restaurants.”

  But I have no idea where to start because I recognise nothing. Even when we come across a playground that looks familiar, I see that the units and terraces around it have been renovated. They look expensive and trendy and I feel as if there is no way that we could ever have lived here and it begins to confuse me. The redevelopment around here is mind-blowing. Restaurants and cafes and a massive international hotel.

  “Where did the other people go?” I ask Griggs. “The people with nothing but their plastic bags and shopping trolleys filled with everything they own? What did people say to them? ‘You can’t afford to be homeless here?’”

  “Let’s get something to eat. You haven’t had anything since last night.”

  I don’t answer and I realise that this was all a big mistake. He takes my hand but I pull away. I’m beginning to feel an anxiety attack coming on and it makes me irritable and narky.

  “Did you ever eat at a regular restaurant around here?” he asks.

  “Jonah, who eats at restaurants?” I snap. “I’ve never eaten in a restaurant in my life. So stop asking such stupid questions.”

  “I’m only asking because maybe someone might recognise you and be able to help,” he says patiently.

  All of a sudden, everything about him annoys me. His pragmatism, his patience, his Levis, and his navy long-sleeved T-shirt. I want him back in his fatigues. I know how to deal with that Jonah Griggs. Out of uniform he’s not playing a role anymore and the real Jonah Griggs is scarier than the Cadet leader. His emotions are a thousand times more real.

  I stare at him and he has that look on his face that asks, What?

  “Wherever we go or whoever we meet, promise me you won’t judge my mother.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Promise.”

  “I can’t,” he says, not only irritated but dismissive. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Fine. Call it cold. But you’ve told me too many things that I’ll never forgive her for.”

  “Then I wish I hadn’t told you,” I snap.

  “But you did,” he snaps back, “so find someone else who will love and forgive her, because it won’t be me.”

  “Then why are you here?” I’m shouting now and I don’t know why, because the last thing I want to do is fight with him in the middle of a Sydney street.

  He stops and looks at me. “I’m here because of you. You’re my priority. Your happiness, in some fucked way, is tuned in to mine. Get that through your thick skull. Would I like it any other way? Hell, yes, but I don’t think that will be happening in my lifetime.”

  “Wow,” I say sarcastically. “That’s way too much romance for me today.”

  “If you want romance, go be with Ben Cassidy. Maybe he’ll fawn all over you or play a beautiful piece of violin music. I never promised you romance. And stop finding a reason to be angry with me. I didn’t redevelop this place. I just asked if you ate at restaurants.”

  For a while we walk in silence, and it’s uncomfortable and angry. We come across a café on a corner where business people are waiting in line to order coffee and two cheerful guys behind the counter are fast and efficient. Sometimes they look up at one of the customers and say, “Flat white and ham-and-cheese croissant?” before the person has even opened their mouth, and I wish they’d do the same with me. Just look up and recognise me and know exactly what I order every day.

  But they don’t, because this is a whole other world to the one I lived in seven years ago. Griggs orders coffee and bacon and eggs for himself then looks at me. I shrug.

  “White toast and marmalade and a hot chocolate,” he says, and it doesn’t surprise me just how much he’s taken in about me.

  We eat in silence and then he buys some fruit and puts it in my backpack and we set off towards Kings Cross.

  “Do you eat at restaurants?” I ask him quietly, wondering if he regrets coming with me.

  “Yeah. With my mum and Daniel, my brother. Or sometimes with Jack, my mum’s boyfriend. At least once a week.”

  “Do you like Jack?”

  “He’s a great guy. He’s fantastic with Daniel and he takes care of my mum without trying to take over.”

  “Your brother sounds like he’s your friend.”

  “My brother is my god,” he says. “I can’t begin to tell you how decent that kid is.”

  “I can’t imagine him being more decent than his brother.”

  He looks at me and I can see his body relax a bit. He puts his arm around me and kisses the top of my head as we walk.

  “Jonah,” I say quietly, never wanting him to let go. “Just say I didn’t exist?”

  It’s the longest day of my life. The lack of familiarity gets worse. The main drag of Kings Cross gives me snippets of memory but not enough. I feel like it’s a foreign land. It’s cleaner and the people look different: better dressed, better looking, comfortable. It’s not as if there is something wrong about an area being cleaned up and gentrified, especially when it was famous for prostitution and drugs and corruption, but it has wiped out my history. Everything smells different and everyone walks at a different pace.

  “When we lived here her name was Annie,” I tell Griggs. “She used to change it all the time. She said that people were after us and she’d say, ‘Your name is Tessa today.’ But I’d lie in bed at night and I’d say to myself over and over again, ‘My name is Taylor Markham.’ I never wanted to be anyone else. She used to say that I named myself. Like she didn’t care enough to name me.”

  “It’s probably a better reason than that. Did you hang out with
any kids around here?”

  “Not really. There was one kid, Simon. His father was a transvestite and he’d let us wear his clothes. We’d go to video arcades and games rooms. He was addicted to all the games. Sometimes we’d just hang out in the parks. It’s how I learnt to play chess, you know.”

  “We can start there,” Griggs says.

  “I don’t think I’d remember what he looked like,” I say. “And I doubt he’d still be around.”

  “Where else would he go aside from the park?”

  We go to a Time Zone. It’s the closest reminder of my former life so far. A couple of kids are off their faces and someone has spewed right near the entrance. Some are in uniform and I can imagine them having left that morning pretending they were going to school. But the ones who leave the biggest impression are those in casual clothes. They don’t have to answer to anyone. I ask the guy at the register if he knows Simon and he shrugs and carries on reading his magazine. “It’s a common name,” is all he says when I bug him again.

  “If he comes in, can you tell him that Taylor Markham is looking for him? That I’ll be at McDonald’s across the road at six thirty tonight?”

  It’s like talking to a brick wall, actually even worse because at least I could lean on a brick wall. I talk to a few other people around and I give them the same information but by the time I walk out, I accept that Simon is not an option.

  We go to one of the homeless hostels in East Sydney. One minute we’re walking down a street that Griggs reckons has million-dollar properties and the next we’re turning into a lane where old men lie on the road on filthy mattresses, garbage everywhere. When I look at them closely, though, I realise they aren’t so old. The hostel caters only to men and after we ask around, we’re directed to another one on the other side of the main road. For the first time in what feels like ages, I find myself thinking of the Hermit. In my memory he was old, but now I realise that he wasn’t at all. He was like these men, who dirt and grime and neglect have made seem a thousand years older than they are.

  When we get to the top of the queue at the second soup kitchen, I take out the photo of the five and show the girl serving. “Do you recognise this person?” I ask, pointing to Tate. “It’s very dated but she may look familiar.”

  “Sorry, love,” she says, shaking her head.

  “I really need to find her,” I say. “Could you ask the other people in there?”

  What are the odds of anyone recognising my mother? What are the odds that these people have actually looked in the faces of the people who walk into this place? I glance at Griggs, who is looking around the room at everyone. I can tell he’s a bit shell-shocked. He tries to muster up a smile but there’s not really enough to keep it there.

  When we’re not asking people questions or roaming the streets for any type of recognition, we sit in McDonald’s because it’s the only place where they don’t bug you to order or leave. By late afternoon I’m tired and I want to go back to my room at school and just lie down. I can sense that Griggs is exhausted, especially after driving all night. We make plans to book into one of the youth hostels in the street behind the main drag, careful of how we spend the money. We find out where the food vans are, in case I recognise someone there who might know my mother or even Simon, but my mind is a blank and I feel like there’s no way I’ll ever know anyone. Each time I check my watch I think of what Raffy and everyone else are doing back home. I have been away for not even twenty-four hours and I am homesick beyond comprehension.

  At night the place begins to look a bit more like I remember it, and Griggs suggests that we stick around because this could be the time when people I might recognise come out of hibernation.

  We stand by the fountain on Darlinghurst Road and for a moment I get a glimpse of who I was back then. Tagging along behind my mother on these streets, our feet dirty, but our dresses so pretty. I wore a white one, once, someone’s old communion dress that we had found in an op-shop and I thought I was a princess. Suddenly, for one incredible moment, I remember something. That my mother smiled at me in wonder that day and said, “Look at my beautiful girl.”

  He had been away from the Jellicoe Road for a year and, when he finished his final exams, he came back because he had promised Narnie he would. Along the way he saw their ghosts—planting the poppies, waiting for him at the general store, planning their tunnel, grieving for their dead. But living in the heart of Narnie was the only home he had ever had. Deep down he knew he wasn’t enough to keep Narnie alive for the rest of her life. But he could try.

  “Promise me…” he said to her at her door, his heart aching when he saw Webb’s soul in her eyes. But then he stopped himself. No promises about death or keeping alive. That had been Tate’s job when Narnie seemed so fragile over the years. It sounded weak coming from him.

  “Promise me that you’ll never go looking for Tate. Whatever you do, don’t go looking for Tate.”

  “Promise me that you’ll never ask me that again,” she’d replied, her voice strong and clear.

  He shook his head. “She’s not Tate anymore, Narnie. She’s someone else and that baby…”

  “Promise me that one day we’ll bring them back here, Jude.”

  He could tell her now what she’d find, because he had gone looking himself. In the city, the Tate they knew was gone. Lost to them. Lost to herself. But Narnie stared deep inside him and he remembered what brought him to this place now. This girl, standing on the side of the Jellicoe Road like an apparition, promising him a richer life than he ever dreamed of. And he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t hold it back until they were in her room, tugging at each other’s clothing, breathing each other’s breath, tasting each other’s grief.

  “Promise me…promise me…” he said between gasps, bunching up her skirt, removing anything that got in their way. The need to be inside her, connected to her, made his body shudder just at the thought of it. She clutched him, her fingers digging in like she needed to gather parts of him to act as her own second skin for the rest of her life. He had never heard emotion from Narnie before and now…now it was so loud, so gut-wrenching that he wanted to cover her mouth with his hand. To hold everything within her. But Narnie had held it in for too long and her rage, or pain or grief or love, pierced his ears and he knew that, no matter what, he’d never be able to block it out. That he’d never want to.

  Then when it was over, she gathered him into her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.

  That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother was alive. That had been her sin.

  And this was her penance.

  Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead.

  Chapter 23

  “Taylor Markham?”

  I look up at the boy standing in front of me. One or two of his teeth are chipped and his skin looks rough with broken capillaries. It’s not acne but it looks raw and painful. He is small and wiry and his eyes have that intense wild look that I’ve seen on many of the faces at the soup kitchens and food vans. This kid, younger than me by at least two years, looks like some kind of Charles Manson copycat. I stare at him for a moment, totally at a loss because I know it’s not Simon. But then it hits me and my heart picks up a beat of excitement.

  Not because he means something to me but because he is proof that I existed. He lived in the room next door to us. Him and his mum. She’d leave him with me sometimes and the rest is a blank.

  He knows I can hardly remember him. He has that disgusted look on his face you get when someone forgets your name. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he says flatly.

  The shock of his words makes my blood run cold and I can feel Griggs tensing up next to me. The kid is fidgety, like he’s either on something or just coming off it. I look at his arm and see the bruising from the needle marks and he catches me looking but there’s no expression on his face. He’s numb to the world.

  I stare at him. How can you just forget a person completely until the mom
ent you see his face again? Who else is back there lurking in my head?

  “My mother? Have you seen her?” I ask.

  “Around. But not for a while.”

  “How long a while?”

  “Don’t care. I’ve got to be someplace,” he says, and just like that he walks away.

  I stand staring, my mind full of a thousand thoughts that I am so used to shoving into locked drawers. But this time I let those thoughts stay no matter how bad they may be.

  Sam. I don’t quite know where the name has come from but it appears on my lips like a sob and I run after him. “Sam!” The sound of his name stops him and for a moment I see a flash of something like vulnerability.

  “Go,” I say. “Wherever you have to be. But meet us later. At the McDonald’s.”

  He knows which McDonald’s because we’ve been there before.

  “My shout.”

  We wait for hours and then he’s there. He totally ignores Griggs and sits down opposite me.

  I don’t know what to say to him and I don’t really get the sense that he actually wants to talk to me but he doesn’t move.

  “Do you want something to eat?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Maybe a Big Mac.”

  I look at Griggs who keeps on staring at the kid like he doesn’t trust him for a moment.

  “Jonah?” I say. He gives me one of those looks that say, I’m not going anywhere, but after a moment he reluctantly stands up.

  “Would you like fries with that?” he asks Sam sarcastically.

  “Large Coke.”

  “Same,” I say.

  We’re left alone.

  “How come you thought I was dead?” I ask, staring at him the whole time, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  The kid shrugs. He scratches a scab on his finger and the crust falls on the table in front of us. “Do you have cigarettes?” he asks.

  “You can’t smoke in here.”

  “For later.”

  I shake my head.

  “Have you got ten dollars?”

  I nod and we don’t speak for a while.