On the Jellicoe Road

  Griggs returns and sits down again. Under the table, I squeeze his hand.

  “Sam’s mother worked with mine,” I tell Griggs, almost conversationally. “I used to look after him.”

  Griggs nods.

  “I don’t think he actually understands what you mean by ‘work,’” Sam says. “Do you, dickhead?”

  “Maybe we can go outside and you can explain it to me,” Griggs says to him quietly.

  Not now, Griggs, I want to say. I can tell it is going to kill him to keep his mouth shut.

  Sam concentrates on the food and wolfs it down almost in three mouthfuls. I take small bites of mine.

  “I need to find her, Sam,” I say when he seems to be finished. “It’s really important. Maybe your mum will know.”

  “Eve? She’s a fruitcake. It’s like everything’s fried up there, do you know what I mean? Every time I ring her it’s like, ‘Sam, can you lend me twenty dollars?’” He puts on a whining voice. “‘Can you buy me a case of beer? Can you buy me some ciggies?’” He looks at me intensely. As if a thought has just occurred to him. “And she never pays me back. She’s a waste of space and she keeps on having these fucking kids.”

  I remember Eve now. She lived totally for the guy she was with and Sam was the number twelve priority in her life. Sam was a pathetic kid, so tiny and needy. His nose was continually running and he was always getting bashed up by older kids in the area. The one thing about my mother was that she never formed emotional attachments to men, so I never had to suffer the consequences of her relationships. Sometimes when we were walking along, I’d see her looking in the distance as if she was searching for someone. I think now that she believed that Webb could have been out here and it’s what kept her around this place for so long.

  “Do you remember the last time you saw me?” he asks.

  I don’t answer and he continues. “Eve had left us at home with Les, that arsehole she was going out with.”

  I shudder and I sense Griggs looking at me.

  “The cops got him, you know. Part of the kid porn thing a couple of months ago. Remember your mum came after her shift and went berserk and she was belting Les with everything she could find and she was screaming, ‘What the fuck have you done to them?’”

  I shake my head. But I do remember now and I know it’s the story I told Raffy that she’ll never forget. The one she wouldn’t let me remember.

  “And we were just standing there in our knickers crying because we didn’t get why she was going apeshit and she grabbed you and dragged you out of there and Eve was shouting at her and calling her a crazy bitch and the neighbours went nuts.”

  “Whose mother was the bigger fruitcake? Yours or mine?”

  Next to me I sense the change in Griggs’s breathing.

  “And I never saw you again. Two days later she came back without you. She was so off her face. Eve asked, ‘Where’s the kid?’ and your mum said, ‘She’s in heaven,’ and she just killed herself laughing for ages. Fuck, I cried for a week, you know.”

  I’m staring at him with my mouth open. “Why would my mother say something like that?”

  Sam doesn’t respond to questions and doesn’t wait for answers. He just speaks and I can’t even block him out because it takes too much effort.

  “You had a Spiderman outfit,” he continues.

  “Saving the neighbourhood from evil,” I say weakly, remembering my line.

  He stands up. “Got to be somewhere,” he says. “You said you had money.”

  I look at Griggs, pleadingly, but Griggs is staring at me like he’s been hit by a truck.

  I glance back at Sam and there’s a look on his face. Like he hates me. “You’re angry with me,” I say as he begins to walk away.

  “Let him go,” Griggs says quietly.

  But I can’t. I jump out of the booth and go after him. “I didn’t ask her to take me out to a Seven-Eleven six hundred kilometres from here and leave me there, Sam. At least your mother didn’t do that to you,” I say angrily. Griggs tries to pull me away.

  “Mine went to Canberra for two weeks,” Sam says, looking at me with massive cold eyes. “But she didn’t leave me there. She left me with Les.”

  I stare at him. Griggs is standing next to me, rubbing his eyes, like he’d love to just disappear. After a couple of minutes I take some of Santangelo’s money from Griggs and stuff it into Sam’s hand. Our fingers touch for a moment.

  “You didn’t even know who I was,” he says. “I knew you straightaway.” And that little hurt boy is back and I let myself remember things that I’ve been blocking for years.

  “What do you want me to remember, Sam? That I taught you to read? And we read the first Harry Potter book and when I finished you said…you said…” I can hardly speak because I’m crying again.

  “I said, ‘I wish I was a wizard,’” he whispers.

  We stare at each other for a moment and he pockets the money.

  “Do you know where Oxford Street is?” he asks after a moment.

  I look at Griggs and he nods.

  “Meet me there tonight at about ten thirty. At the lights outside the Court House Hotel.”

  I nod again.

  “I’ll find out what I can from Eve.”

  Griggs and I walk in total silence. We’re in a laneway where rubbish is strewn and bins are overflowing. Suddenly he kicks one of the bins with full force and it goes flying. I stand and watch him. His back is to me. I walk up and put my arms around him, leaning against him.

  I feel his heart thumping hard and his hands take mine and they are shaking.

  “You okay now?” I ask him after a while.

  He doesn’t say anything, but just turns around and holds me.

  “Jonah, regardless of what happened, I’ve spent the last six years living in…”

  I think for a moment and a little touch of hope makes itself felt.

  “What?” he asks.

  “I was going to say, ‘I’ve spent the last six years living in paradise.’ Do you get it? It’s like heaven. That’s what she meant.”

  “Except the kid thought you were dead.”

  “She took me out there and rang up Hannah because if there was one place Tate loved, it was Jellicoe and she knew it would be the safest place for me.”

  “And when she came back, the kid said she was absolutely off her face because you were gone from her life,” he said.

  I’m looking at him in wonder. “I never thought she loved me, you know.”

  It’s a quarter to eleven before Sam shows. He has that edgy look about him, unable to keep still, his eyes like a crazed rabbit about to be caught.

  “She’s in a hos—hospice? Up the road. St. Vincent’s.”

  “Hospital,” I correct.

  “Whatever.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  He shrugs. He looks around, edging away, but I catch a glimpse of some need in his eyes. Like he hasn’t given up completely.

  Griggs takes my hand and pulls me away, but I don’t want to let go.

  “Sam!” I call out and he turns around. “I live on the Jellicoe Road. Where trees make canopies overhead and where you can sit at the top of them and see forever. My aunt built me a house there. Remember that.”

  He’s staring at me but it’s better than him walking away.

  “Promise me you’ll remember,” I say forcefully.

  He nods and we walk away but like Lot’s wife I turn back. He’s talking to this middle-aged guy who has his hand on his shoulder. The next minute they both get into a taxi and then they’re gone.

  “Let’s go,” Griggs says quietly.

  At the hostel we get our own room. It’s tiny with double bunks but we climb into the same bed and Griggs holds on to me like he’s never going to let go.

  “Do you want to know why I called my school that time?” he asks in the dark.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “No, I want to. I had this dream. That someone—
actually it was my father—spoke to me and he said, ‘Jonah, if you go any farther, you will never come back,’ and although I’ve been told a million times during counselling that I don’t need his forgiveness, I just thought it was the closest thing to it. That maybe he was protecting me from something out there and that the warning was his way of saying that he forgave me. Then I thought, if I’m not coming back, then you probably won’t be either so I called the school and next thing the Brigadier and Santangelo’s dad turn up.”

  He sounds so sad that it breaks my heart.

  “But now that we’re out here, as bad as everything seems, I don’t think my life or yours was at risk. So I must have imagined it all. There was no message. There was no forgiveness. Nothing.”

  “You don’t know that. We were younger then, Jonah. Maybe something would have happened to us if we had reached the city. And, as Jessa would say, there is always that serial killer. Maybe your dad was warning you because he cared.”

  He shakes his head and, although it’s dark, I can tell he’s crying.

  “What are you thinking?” I whisper after a while.

  “That you deserve romance,” he says.

  I trace his face with my fingers. “Let me see. A guy tells me that he would have thrown himself in front of a train if it wasn’t for me and then drives seven hours straight, without whingeing once, on a wild-goose chase in search of my mother with absolutely no clue where to start. He is, in all probability, going to get court-martialled because of me, has put up with my moodiness all day long, and knows exactly what to order me for breakfast. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that, Jonah.”

  “I’m in year eleven, Taylor. I’m not going to get court-martialled.”

  “Just say you get expelled?”

  “Then so be it. I still would have driven for seven hours and ordered you hot chocolate and white toast and marmalade.”

  “And you don’t call that romantic? God, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  I sit up in the dark and after a moment I take off my singlet and I hear him taking off his T-shirt and we sit there, holding each other, kissing until our mouths are aching, and then we’re pulling off the rest of our clothes and I’m under him and I feel as if I’m imprinted onto his body. Everything hurts, every single thing including the weight of him and I’m crying because it hurts and he’s telling me he’s sorry over and over again, and I figure that somewhere down the track we’ll work out the right way of doing this but I don’t want to let go, because tonight I’m not looking for anything more than being part of him. Because being part of him isn’t just anything. It’s kind of everything.

  Chapter 24

  During this time I start to get to know my mother again by piecing together fragments of our lives, snippets of Hannah’s story and Sam’s miserable memories. What kills me most is my inability to remember much of that journey when she drove me to the Jellicoe Road. And I want to. I want to remember the look in her eyes when she realised that she had to let go of the person who was her closest link to Webb. Did she look at me and tell me she loved me? Or did she not speak at all because the words would slice her throat, leaving her to bleed to death all the way back?

  While I sit in the foyer of St. Vincent’s hospital, waiting for the receptionist to finish on the phone, I think of everything I have always wanted to say to my mother and how in the past twenty-four hours all of it has changed.

  “You ready?” Griggs asks, coming back from ringing Santangelo.

  I shake my head.

  “How about I go up and ask?”

  I look at him, trying to manage a smile.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks. I’ve been piecing together tiny details about him as well. That he always asks that question because he has to see a counsellor every week at home and that’s what his counsellor asks him. And that sometimes he’s a bit shy, like he is at the moment and has been all morning. It makes me feel shy back. I wonder if everyone else is shy the morning after or whether they chat and laugh as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. I wonder if we’re unnatural.

  “I’m thinking that after last night you shouldn’t have to spend your morning in a hospital finding out if my mother has tried to OD.”

  “And I’m thinking that after last night I want to be anywhere you are and if that means being in a hospital asking about your mother, then so be it.”

  But we know that we’re both thinking about much more than what we’re doing here now.

  “Just say after Wednesday we never see each—”

  “Don’t,” he says, angry.

  “Jonah, you live six hundred kilometres away from me,” I argue.

  “Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks’ holiday and five random public holidays. There’s email and if you manage to get down to the town, there’s text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there’s this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty.”

  “Gees, Jonah,” I say in mock indignation. “I wish you’d put more thought into our relationship.”

  “And then we make plans.”

  “As long as you don’t have an affair with Lily, the girl next door.”

  “Her name’s actually Gerty. She’s bigger than me and can beat me in an arm-wrestle. There is no way in this world that I will ever, ever go out with someone called Gerty because if I married her and she wanted to take my name, she’d be called Gerty Griggs.”

  I laugh for the first time in days and then I take a deep breath and stand up. “I’m ready.”

  We walk to the counter and I ask politely for Tate Markham, hoping she’s under that name. The receptionist looks on a written list in front of her and shakes her head.

  “Are you sure she’s here?” she asks.

  “No, but we were told she was.”

  She taps her keyboard and I’m beginning to feel sick. Don’t let me have to start again, I pray. She shakes her head and I hear Griggs clear his throat.

  “Is there a St. Vincent’s hospice around?”

  “Next door.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief and thank her before walking away.

  “What’s the diff?” I ask him.

  He shrugs.

  When we walk into the hospice, I go through the same routine again. After a moment I can see the receptionist has come across the name and she peers at it closely. “She was here,” she says.

  I feel Griggs’s arm around me. Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being?

  “She checked out.”

  The relief almost sends me over the counter to hug her. “Checked out? Like not a euphemism ‘checked out’ but a real one?”

  The woman looks confused. “She checked out six weeks ago.”

  Six weeks ago everything changed in my world. Hannah left. Griggs arrived. The boy in the tree in my dreams began to bring a sobbing creature to our nightly tête-à-tête.

  “What was the date?”

  She looks at us and I can see the shutter go down. “We have privacy laws and we can’t just give out information….”

  “Please,” I beg her, taking out my wallet and showing her my student card. “Our names are the same. I can show you a photo of her. She’s my mother and I haven’t seen her for six years.”

  She looks at me and then at Griggs and I feel as if she’s going to get emotional as well but then she taps on her keyboard again.

  “She was signed out on the sixteenth of September.”

  I look at Griggs. “Last time I saw Hannah was on the fifteenth.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We have the Leadership Council on the fifteenth of September every year and I saw her the morning a
fter. We had an argument.”

  I turn back to the receptionist. “Did she sign herself out?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, reading the screen.

  “Did Hannah Schroeder sign her out?”

  “No,” the receptionist peers closer at her screen. “Jude Scanlon did.”

  “Jude,” I whisper, excited. “Oh my God, Jonah. I’m going to meet Jude.”

  “Jude Scanlon?” Griggs says. “You never mentioned a Jude Scanlon.”

  “Yeah I did,” I look up at the woman and smile. “Thanks.”

  “Good luck,” she says.

  “He’s the Cadet,” I explain as we walk away. “The one I told you about who planted the poppies.”

  “Taylor,” he says, and I can tell by the look on his face that something is not right. “Jude Scanlon is not just the Cadet. He’s the Brigadier.”

  I’m in shock but everything is starting to make sense. We go back to where we parked the car and it doesn’t start. While Griggs attempts to fix it, I sit on the kerb and use his phone to ring home. One of the year nines answers and she puts me through a mini third-degree, questioning me about where I am and when I’m coming back and if I’m coming back and something about Mr. Palmer and the Army man taking Jessa that morning. I ask her to give the phone to Raffy and a few seconds later I hear her familiar voice.

  “Where are you?” she asks, and there are five different tones in her voice, including shittiness and concern and relief.

  “What’s happening there?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she sighs. “Mr. Palmer and the Brigadier took Jessa this morning and they haven’t returned her. Please tell me they aren’t the serial killers.”

  “No, they’re not. Promise me that you’ll never repeat that theory.”

  “Promise me that you’re coming back.”

  “Of course I am. Why have they taken Jessa? Can’t you find out through Chaz’s dad?”

  “Chaz’s dad is furious. I mean big-time furious with a big fat F.”

  “Did he find out that Chaz broke into the police station?”

  I can see Griggs looking up from what he’s doing and waiting for the answer.