Santangelo’s dad stares at me and then at Jude. I know they think I’m crazy but I know I’m not.
“It was such a good dream,” I tell Jude, wanting him to believe me, “and I wanted to stay but he threw me off the tree and then I woke up.”
“You weren’t asleep, Taylor,” Mr. Palmer says flatly, “and you didn’t faint.”
Someone comes in with floodlights and they put them down the hole. Richard crouches next to me and we wait.
“You think Jessa and Chloe P. are down there?” he asks.
“I know they are.”
He moves as close to the hole as possible and then crawls back to where I am. “Who built it?” he asks.
“Hannah, the Brigadier, Jessa’s dad, and my mum and dad. My dad was the leader of Murrumbidgee House, you know,” I explain, and for the first time in my whole life I feel a sense of pride. “He was the one who came up with the idea.”
“That explains your psychotic personality,” he mutters before leaving.
I watch the rural brigade guy because he looks like he’s going to be our number one prophet of doom.
“Jude? Can I have a word?” he asks. There’s this look between them that I don’t trust.
“You’re going to ask him how long they can stay down there, aren’t you?” I say, looking to Jude for the answer. “How long they have left.”
There is silence for a moment and even Santangelo pulls his head out of the hole just to hear the answer.
“Fastest anyone did it was twenty minutes: Narnie. It was because she was small so Jessa and the other little girl have got that on their side.”
“Her name’s Chloe,” Mr. Palmer informs him.
“Slowest?” I ask.
“Forty minutes. One of us fainted down there and by the time we got him out he was having trouble breathing. You’ve got to understand that you’re not actually crawling through a tunnel. You’re squeezing through a hole.”
“Webb?” I ask.
He nods. “Webb was stocky.”
“Why did you let Jonah go, then?” I ask, angrily. “He’s massive and he’ll get stuck.”
“Because he’s still smaller or fitter than any of us. Besides he won’t freak out and he’s got endurance and believe me, Taylor, down there…”
“…you see the devil because it’s so dark.”
He nods. “I did the whole return trip only once and vowed I would never do it again. It was different when we were building, because we started digging from both ends, so we’d only have to crawl for half the way.”
“So how long have they been down there?” Santangelo asks.
“I’m guessing they would have stayed in the room until the smoke became too much for them. I’d say it’s already been thirty minutes.”
“Wouldn’t they have got to this end by now?”
No one says anything. Santangelo’s head disappears in the hole again and I look at Jude, wanting to read something, anything, on his face.
We sit next to each other in silence while the emergency crew comes in and out and the ambulance officers begin to arrive. Sometimes I see Murrumbidgee faces at the door but Santangelo’s dad instructs Richard to take them upstairs to the senior rooms. Because he thinks they’re going to be wheeling out bodies through the dorm and he doesn’t want the kids to see them. For the billionth time I feel sick.
“She didn’t write about being in the tunnel,” I say to Jude quietly.
“She didn’t write about a lot of things.”
“Why? Was being in the tunnel worse than seeing her mother dead…or more personal than what happened between you and her?”
I don’t think he likes that I know the intimate details of their lives.
“When Webb didn’t return from the tunnel and everyone was getting anxious, she went in. Narnie was bloody frightening when she was fearless. I remember their faces when we pulled them out. She was—God, I don’t know—stunned.”
“Do you think he told her something?” I asked. “Maybe he told her that he was leaving you all. Maybe he’d had enough of Narnie’s depression or Tate wanting to consume him. Maybe it wasn’t Fitz after all….”
“No, I think he did something in the tunnel that Narnie had done long ago. He lost hope. Webb without hope was like the engine failing on a plane. He was our life force and I think she saw that down in the tunnel and it frightened her.”
“Shhh,” Santangelo says to everyone. “I think I hear something.” He puts his head and half his body down the hole again and his father holds on to his legs, around the knees.
I can’t hear a thing. We wait, my pulse beating out of control and another sick feeling comes over me.
Just say Griggs loses hope down there. And Chloe P. And Jessa.
Just say Jessa never giggles again. Or sings karaoke or pesters me with a trillion inane questions. Just say she never snuggles up in bed with the other girls, whispering about the boys they have crushes on. Just say she never grows up to be my age and just say she never falls in love or gets to know what type of people her parents were. Just say she never gets to be someone’s mother and someone’s life-long friend.
Just say she never gets to hear me say that I always knew she was something special and that’s why I was so horrible to her. Because people with that much spirit frighten the hell out of me. They make me want to be a better person when I know it’s not possible.
“Okay,” Santangelo’s muffled voice says, and they begin pulling him up. He’s holding Griggs’s legs and there’s dirt everywhere. Everyone’s hands are grabbing at anything, trying to get them out of there. I see Griggs’s torso, absolutely blackened, and then his arms and then his hands and then more hands and I can tell it’s Jessa but she’s not moving. He’s panting and they’re pulling Jessa out and the emergency crew are placing breathing stuff over both their mouths and they won’t let me near until they have everything in place.
Griggs looks shaken and I know that it’s killing him but he can’t go down again.
He looks at Santangelo, who looks at his father, who reluctantly nods.
“If you close your eyes, you get to control your own darkness,” Jude tells Santangelo. “Do you understand?”
Santangelo nods and they help him in.
I don’t want to feel relief, because Jessa isn’t moving and Chloe P. is still down there. I go over to Jessa but the emergency crew are working on her and they need their space. I feel useless.
“Will she know your voice?” one of the ambulance people ask me.
I nod. “Of course.”
“I think I broke her arm,” Griggs says, wincing from where he is lying.
“Don’t you move until we can check you out, too,” one of the ambulance officers says.
We hover over them and the ambulance man looks at me. “Talk to her. We need her to respond.”
I lie down next to Jessa and take her hand. For a moment I don’t know what to say. So I tell her the story she loves best. Of her father who stole a bike and rode down the Jellicoe Road and saved the lives of my parents and Hannah. I tell her that they loved him like a brother and how that night changed their lives forever. I tell her about Tate’s sister, who was only eight years old when she died, and how Fitz went into the wreckage for the umpteenth time to carry out her body as well as the bodies of my other grandparents, knowing he could die at any moment. And when I can’t tell the story anymore because it breaks my heart, Santangelo’s dad takes over, because he was there that night. The ambulance driver has his story to tell about Fitz McKenzie as well and Jude fills in the rest.
I sit there and listen to the history of my family, the Schroeders and the Markhams, who set out on their separate journeys that day not realising the tragic ironies and joys of that collision of worlds on the Jellicoe Road. And of the people they would never have met if it hadn’t happened. Like Fitz and Jude.
And me.
Of the people I would never have met if I had just belonged to one half of them. Like Raffy an
d Jessa and Chaz and Ben.
And Jonah Griggs.
I look at him as they patch him up and he looks back at me and I know that it will be one of the last chances I’ll have to see him this close for a very long time.
Again we sit in silence, waiting for Santangelo to emerge and, five minutes later, Chloe P. comes out of the tunnel crying and she clutches onto me while they check her out for any broken bones. Her face is caked with mud and she panics any time they try to put the mask over her face.
And then, for the first time all night everyone breathes in rhythm. Mr. Palmer, like every other adult I’ve seen tonight, looks a thousand years older but he’s relieved and breaks the hands-off rule, hugging me so tight that I almost stop breathing. Again.
“Are they okay?” Richard asks from the door.
The ambulance man gives the thumbs-up and Richard disappears behind the door and a couple of seconds later we hear shouting and cheering and stamping of feet from upstairs and outside and the place becomes a circus.
When they wheel the girls out, the whole school seems to be lining the driveway. Lachlan girls are jumping all over me, flying at me from all directions. I look for Griggs but he gets swallowed up in the mayhem and I feel a weariness that I can’t shake.
When we get to the hospital, Raffy and most of the year sevens and eights who had been taken down to the town are there. I don’t think anyone has the heart to tell them to stop making a racket.
“This is the best night of my life,” Raffy says, crying.
“Raffy, half our House has burnt down,” I say wearily. “We don’t have a kitchen.”
“Why do you always have to be so pessimistic?” she asks. “We can double up in our rooms and have a barbecue every night like the Cadets.”
Silently I vow to keep Raffy around for the rest of my life.
I wake up in the waiting room of the hospital, leaning against Jude’s shoulder. He’s reading a newspaper and glances at me when I move. I look at him for a long time, maybe because for so long, every single time he crossed my path I had looked away. I had misunderstood my anxiety.
“I remember…being on your shoulders,” I say sleepily.
“I remember you being on my shoulders,” he says, putting down the newspaper.
I sit up and stretch, my neck is out in so many places. “You were wrong yesterday in the car, you know,” I tell him. “About how every time Hannah looks at you she’s wishing you were someone else. I think that every time she looks at you she’s scared you won’t come back, like the others.”
He doesn’t say anything but after a moment or two he smiles sadly. “Your mother rang Hannah six weeks ago. Told her that she didn’t have much time left but that Hannah owed her. That she wanted to die clean.”
He stops for a moment and I know there’ll be many of these pauses. For a second or two I close my eyes because I want to go back to the tree but I don’t. I go back to the shoulders of the giant.
“Hannah was…inconsolable, like she was when we knew Webb was dead and when Fitz died. Worse still, Tate’s plan was crazy. If there was ever a time that Tate needed drugs, it was now but you don’t know your mother. She had it all worked out. Forget rehab, she wouldn’t be able to cope with the affirmations and she couldn’t deal with spending so much time in the end with strangers. She was going to go cold turkey, even the chemo was going to stop, and she wanted Hannah and me there with her. So I went and got her and Hannah came down and they’ve been up in the mountains outside Sydney.”
“It’s because my mother wanted to die beholden to no one. Like Mrs. Dubose.”
“No, it wasn’t that. When I signed her out she said, ‘I want to die clean for my baby girl, Jude. That’s all I want. It’s all I have to give her.’”
I wonder about things. Like what she thinks I look like and if she and my father ever spoke about what they wanted for me. But before I can say anything, Jude’s looking over my shoulder and I see a change in him. I’ve never seen this look on his face before but I’ve imagined it. The way Jude Scanlon would have looked when he saw Narnie standing by the side of the road when he was fourteen.
I turn in the direction of his gaze and there she is, coming through the hospital doors. Hannah.
I stand up and walk towards her because my days of waiting for more are over. If I want more, I need to go and get it, demand it, take hold of it with all my might, and do the best I can with it. I put my arms around her and hold her tight and for once there is nothing between us. I’m holding one of only two people left in the world who share my blood: my father’s sister, who one night sat in the same spot for four hours just to protect her brother from a sight that would have killed his spirit.
“Is my mum here?” I ask quietly when she lets go.
“At the hospice. We can drive to Sydney tomorrow.”
I shake my head. “Hannah,” I say, “I think my father would want her to come home. To the house by the river.”
She nods. For once I get to make the decisions. “So where are our little tunnel rats?” she asks over my head, looking at Jude.
He takes her hand and draws her to his side. They don’t say anything as they walk with me, but I’ve been here before, so I know that words aren’t needed. I remember love. These two people taught it to me and when I see Hannah lean over and kiss Jessa’s sleeping head, I know that for the rest of my life, no matter what, Hannah and Jude are going to be there. Like they always have been. And tomorrow I’ll need them more than ever.
When my mother returns home for the last time to the Jellicoe Road.
Chapter 26
Aftermath. Everyone uses it all the time so I get very used to the word. In the aftermath we face the reality that the downstairs area of Lachlan is gutted. No photos, no posters, no fish, no clothing, no books, no diaries. Everything’s gone. In the aftermath, when the walls of my world are blackened and the taste in my mouth is of ash, my mother is due to re-enter my life for what will be the last couple of weeks of hers. In the aftermath Jonah Griggs prepares to leave and I have to take it on good faith and a great gut feeling that we will see each other, maybe for the rest of our lives. In the aftermath I finally accept that my father is dead and that the legacy left behind by the person who killed him is a thirteen-year-old kid who clutches my arm as we look at the space around us and whispers, “I knew you’d come and get me, Taylor. I told Chloe P., ‘Don’t worry, Taylor will find us.’”
I hear Mr. Palmer tell Hannah that it was an electrical fault. Five arsonists in one school and it ends up being something so technically boring. They promise us that the dorm and kitchen will be complete by the time we return from the Christmas holidays in a couple of months’ time and I miss the girls already. I miss everything in my world already.
We spend Griggs’s last day at Hannah’s house with Santangelo and Raffy. It’s the first time he meets Hannah, apart from when we were fourteen, and the mood is cool and almost hostile.
“You seem to have a problem with me,” he says in typical Griggs fashion.
I can tell he regrets saying it when he is treated to one of Hannah’s long cold gazes.
“I think it will be a while before I forgive the trip to Sydney,” she says flatly.
“Fair enough. I think it will be a while before I forgive you for what you put her through over the past six weeks.”
I watch them both and for the first time it occurs to me that I’m no longer flying solo and that I have no intention of pretending that I am. I have an aunt and I have a Griggs and this is what it’s like to have connections with people.
“Do you know what?” I ask both of them. “If you don’t build a bridge and get over it, I’ll never forgive either of you.”
From the verandah I watch Griggs inside, through the window, chatting to Raffy and Santangelo.
I can feel Hannah’s gaze on me and I ignore it for as long as I can.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say.
She doesn’t speak.
“Say something,” I say, wanting to take every bad feeling I have out on Hannah because she’s so convenient.
“What do you want me to say?” she asks with that ever-patient voice of hers.
“What you’re thinking.”
“Okay. Why does it have to be so intense between you two?” she asks.
“Because I have an aunt named Narnie and a mother named Tate,” I snap, and I want to stop myself from being like this but I can’t. I’m too sad. I look at her and I can feel tears in my eyes. “Do you think I don’t want him to be gone more than you do? I do. Because I need to know that I can still breathe properly when he’s not around. If something happens to him, I have to know that I won’t fall apart like Tate did without Webb. Even you and Jude. It’s not just my father or Fitz or even Tate you’ve missed all this time. It’s Jude not being in your life.”
“Jude is in my life, Taylor.”
“Then why aren’t you together?”
“He’s a soldier, Taylor,” she says tiredly. “He goes where they send him. East Timor. Solomon Islands. Iraq. Wherever they need to keep the peace. Why is it that we always have to fight?”
“We’re not fighting, Hannah. I just don’t want to hold back anymore and I don’t want you to, either. I’m your only living relative and one day I’m going to have to visit you in a nursing home and spoon-feed you custard and jelly, so I think I’m entitled to know what makes you tick.”
She stares at me and I get this feeling of love because I know her history now and understand how it has made her the way she is at times.
“What makes me tick? Tate. Jessa. You. Jude.”
“When you look at him, he thinks you’re thinking that you’d rather he was Webb or Fitz or Tate. Did you know that?”