On the Jellicoe Road

  “He knows how much he means to me. He wouldn’t think that.”

  “He told me. I asked him why you weren’t together and he said you’ll always be together but that’s bullshit. I’ve worked it out and I’m presuming that you were a couple until I was seven, but in the past ten years you’ve been apart and the only time you see each other is when it has to do with me. You wrote the book on all of this, Hannah. Did you never notice that he always felt left out? It’s like he wanted to be in that accident or he wanted to be crazy like Fitz. Like being Jude Scanlon wasn’t good enough for any of you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why won’t you marry him?”

  “Because he hasn’t asked me. Maybe it was never meant to be that type of relationship. Maybe it was because we survived. The bond—”

  “Hannah, Jude and you don’t have a bond because you’re the only survivors. Jude and you have a problem because you’re the survivors. It’s like you can’t forgive each other. How come you can forgive Tate for what she did and Webb for dying? And Fitz! How come you can forgive him? He killed your brother! He shot him out of a tree! You can forgive all of them but you can’t forgive you and Jude for living.”

  Hannah looks stunned. “What do you want me to say? That if he asked me to marry him, I’d say yes? Okay. Yes. But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes, Taylor, and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can’t forgive yourself for.”

  But I won’t let it go. “I’d forgive myself. To be with Jonah I’d do anything.”

  Jude pulls up at the same time that Griggs comes out of the house.

  “I’ve got to go,” Griggs says from the door. Hannah turns and I notice that she’s more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. She’s nursed a drug addict for the past six weeks and I can tell by her gauntness that it hasn’t been good for her. What went down between her and Tate, I wonder? Was Tate forever envious of the bond between Webb and Narnie? Is that why she wouldn’t let Hannah mother me all those years?

  “Have a safe trip, Jonah,” Hannah says quietly.

  “Thank you.”

  He waits for me. “I’ll catch up,” I tell him as Raffy and Santangelo walk towards Jude, shaking his hand goodbye.

  The plan is that Jude drives down with the Cadets and returns tomorrow with my mother. It’s what he always seems to be doing—saving us from ourselves. I remember the saints from Raffy’s books in year seven. St. Jude was the patron saint of the impossible—lost and desperate causes. I think he hit the jackpot in that department when he met the Markhams and Schroeders.

  “You need anything?” Jude asks from the bottom of the steps.

  Hannah shakes her head. “Don’t drive if you’re tired tomorrow.”

  “I’d better be going,” I say quietly, walking down the steps. When I reach him, I stop.

  I want to say a lot of things to Jude and Hannah. I want to thank them and tell them that my life would be like Sam’s if it wasn’t for them. I want to tell them that the brilliance of that memory of lying between them won’t be easily surpassed and that the stories of their love for each other touch me in a way I didn’t think possible. I want to convince them that my father comes to speak to me at night and that his love for the two of them is never-ending.

  “Jude,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Hannah reckons that if you ask her to marry you, she’ll say yes.”

  I pat him on the shoulder and walk away, breaking into a run when I reach the clearing. Griggs is waiting. He takes my hand and we walk.

  The Cadets leave from the general store. There is a crowd outside the buses while goodbyes are said and much-needed munchy provisions are purchased. I stay close to Griggs while he talks to people around him and although we don’t say a word to each other, we are never more than an inch apart. Every now and again, while he’s speaking to Santangelo’s mum or some of the Townies, our eyes meet and I dare not open my mouth in case I cry.

  One of their teachers calls them from the bus and they begin to file on, calling out last-minute goodbyes. I watch Ben give instructions to Anson Choi, and the Mullet Brothers argue with them at the bus window. They have some gig planned in Canberra and they can’t agree on the songs or their order. But I can tell they all like one another so much even if one of the Mullet Brothers has Ben in a headlock, pretending to hit his head against the side of the bus.

  Ben pulls away and walks towards us, putting his arm around my shoulder ever so innocently.

  “I think you guys need to be on the bus,” he says to Griggs.

  “And I think you may end up under it,” Griggs says, gently pulling me away from Ben.

  We stand looking at each other and, as usual with Griggs, it’s much too intense.

  “So are you going to tell your mother about me?” he asks.

  I look around to where Teresa, the hostage from Darling, is crying while her Cadet watches miserably from the bus window.

  I shrug. “I’ll probably mention that I’m in love with you.”

  He chuckles. “Only you would say that in such a I-think-I’ll-wash-my-hair-tonight tone.”

  He leans down and kisses me and I hold on to his shirt, wanting to savour every moment.

  I hear a few wolf-whistles but he ignores them and we linger.

  My insides are in a million pieces and I feel like someone out of one of those tragic war movies.

  The bus driver honks the horn.

  “You know on the Jellicoe Road where there’s that tree that looks like an old man bent over?” he asks, holding my face between his hands. It’s this feeling I’ll miss most.

  I nod.

  “That’s the closest mobile phone coverage to the School.”

  “Griggs, they’re waiting,” Santangelo says quietly.

  “Let them wait.”

  We kiss again and I don’t care who is watching or how late they’ll be.

  Slowly he untangles himself from me and turns to the others. “See you, Raffy,” he says, lifting her off the ground in a hug. He looks at Santangelo. “You drive them down at Christmas,” he says. “Promise?”

  They grip each other’s hands and hug quickly and then he kisses me again and he’s on the bus. I can see him walking down the aisle, giving someone the finger, and I can imagine what’s being said inside.

  Teresa is sobbing beside me and Trini is trying to console her.

  “He’s in year eight, Teresa,” I remind her. “That means he’s coming back at least another three times.”

  “But just say he forgets about me or meets someone else or pretends I don’t exist.”

  I look at her and then at Trini and Raffy.

  “Teresa, Teresa. Have we taught you nothing?” Raffy says in an irritated voice. “It’s war. You go in and you hunt him down until he realises that he’s made a mistake.”

  Teresa looks hopeful.

  “It’s not as if men haven’t gone to war for dumber reasons,” Trini adds.

  The Mullet Brothers join us and we watch the bus as it leaves. I can sense everyone’s sadness.

  We all walk towards town together.

  “You want us to be there tomorrow?” Santangelo asks quietly.

  I nod.

  “Done.”

  I feel tears running down my face and Raffy takes my hand and squeezes it.

  “What are you so sad about?” Santangelo says to me. “We’re going to know him for the rest of our lives.”

  The car pulls up in front of the house and I stand up. In the photos, when she was seventeen, she had lush black hair, white white skin, and dark blue eyes and a plumpness that spoke of good health. When I was young she had bleached the hair, her skin was pasty, her eyes were always bloodshot, and she was skinny. I can hardly ever remember her eating, just nervously smoking one cigarette after another. I don’t know which image is stronger in my mind but I know I want the girl with the black hair and the glow in her cheeks.

  The person who emerges, though, has
neither, courtesy of the chemotherapy. She’s even thinner than I remember and I’m amazed that she is actually as young as Hannah and Jude. But I can see from here that her eyes are sharp and bright. She looks beyond the house to the oak tree by the river, a ghost of a smile on her face, and I know she’s imagining him there, like Hannah does on those breezy afternoons when it’s just her and her thoughts. And like I do when he visits me in my dreams.

  She smiles at something Jude says and then she walks towards the house, slowly. I stand at the top of the stairs, looking for any sign of me in her face. I wonder how hard it was for her all that time seeing Webb and Narnie’s face stamped on mine and not one single mark of her. When she’s almost at the steps, she notices me and stops. There is wonder in her face, like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. I think she’s expecting the sullen eleven-year-old that she left behind and for a moment I’m scared that she doesn’t know it’s me. But then she starts to cry. Not dramatically but with such sadness, clutching at her throat, looking at me like she can’t believe her eyes. She tries to speak but she isn’t able to. I walk down the steps of the verandah towards her and with shaking hands she holds my face between them, sobbing, “Look at my beautiful girl.”

  I take in every inch of her face, the sick pallor of her skin, the dryness of her lips, and I lean forward and I press my lips against hers, like I want to give them colour again. I touch her face and the bristle of her hair that’s growing back. I like the feel of it under my fingertips, like a massage.

  “It’s not good for Tate to be outside,” Jude says quietly.

  I take her by the hand, up the stairs and inside the house, and she looks around again in awe.

  “It’s just like he planned it,” she says in a hushed tone as Hannah comes over and kisses her gently. I introduce her to Santangelo and Raffy and then Jessa comes running into the house, her arm in a sling, beaming that crazy beam of hers.

  “I’m late and I didn’t want to be but they had to fix my cast and Mr. Palmer was late picking me up.” She looks at my mother. “Did they tell you about the fire and tunnel and how Griggs broke my arm?”

  I take Jessa’s other hand and bring her forward. “This is Jessa McKenzie. She belongs to Fitz.”

  My mother looks at Jessa, shaking her head like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. Hannah comes over and helps her into the chair by the window, putting a pillow behind her, and we hover around her.

  “Look at our girls,” she says to Hannah and Jude. “How did we get to be so lucky?”

  “I think we’ve earned it, Tate.”

  Later, she fills the spaces between Hannah’s stories and my imaginings. She tells me about the time my father had a dream about me before I was born. How we were sitting in a tree and he asked me my name and I said it was Taylor.

  Chapter 27

  And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you’re watching someone die. But there’s a joy and an abundance of everything, like information and laughter and summer weather and so many stories. My mother urges me to write them down because, “You’re the last of the Markhams, my love.” So I record dates and journeys and personalities and traits and heroes and losers and weaknesses and strengths and I try to capture every one of those people because one day I’ll need what they had to offer. Worst and best of all, I get to see who Tate Markham could have been and sometimes I feel so angry that I only got to know this incredible person just when I’m going to lose her. She has a belly laugh that Narnie wasn’t able to hear in her grief, so Hannah wasn’t able to write about it. But if Webb had written the story, I would have known that laugh already. She tells me about her sister, Lily, who was only eight years old when she died, and of how she can still remember the day her father placed her in Tate’s arms, when she was four years old, and said, “How blessed can one man be?”

  And life goes on.

  When some days are worse than others, I find myself walking out of school and sitting at that point on the Jellicoe Road where I can ring Jonah. I’ll feel his frustration and his sense of uselessness at being six hundred kilometres away but I need to hear his stories about Danny and his mum and her boyfriend, Jack, and how they have Thai food on Tuesday nights and watch The Bill. I’ll tell him about Jude moving in and how he sleeps in Hannah’s room and of how Tate and I bullied them into going away one weekend by stressing our need to have time alone together. And of how Raffy and I have to share Trini’s room while Lachlan House gets refurbished and how we have to join Trini in prayer at night. And I can sense his envy when he hears about our weekends with the Santangelos and how Chaz’s mum tells Hannah and Tate about those “two little shits” driving around town in an unregistered car.

  And life goes on.

  When one day fate visits us again, Jessa comes running into Hannah’s house to tell us the news that they’ve caught the serial killer. Her tone is hushed and I try hard not to look at Jude, who is working on the skirting boards. But I can feel the humour in his gaze as it falls on me and I know that I will never live down the fact that I suspected him. When I ask her, “Who?” slightly curious, she’s already out the door looking for Hannah and Tate. “No one important!” she shouts from the other room. “Just some postman in Yass.” I look at Jude’s face and I see it whiten and we vow never ever to tell the others. My mind that night is full of images of those kids I once saw in the newspaper cuttings on Jessa’s bed and of the two who went missing from Yass on the day Jude caught up with me and Jonah. And of the voice Jonah needed to believe was his father, warning us not to go any farther because we would never come back.

  And life goes on.

  When we know it’s close I move into the house and we lie there, my mother and I. I place the earphones in her ears and I let her listen to the music Webb was listening to when he died. Of flame trees and missing those who aren’t around. I tell her that he’s been waiting all these years for her and that ever since she’s been with me he’s visited my dreams every single night. I tell her that the euphoria he feels is like an elixir—one that I believe will be enough to keep her alive.

  But one night he’s not there anymore, nor is Fitz, and my despair is beyond words and I’m screaming out for him, for both of them, standing on the branch where we’d sit. “Webb! Fitz! Please. Come back. Please.” And I wake up and I hold her in my arms, sobbing uncontrollably, “Just one more day, please, Mummy, just one more day, please.” And when it hurts too much, I go up to Hannah and Jude’s room and tell them that she’s dead, and I climb between them and I am raw inside.

  My mother took seventeen years to die. I counted.

  She died in a house on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-la.

  God’s country, Raffy says. She swears to God it’ll change the way I see the world.

  Want to believe in something.

  But love the world just the way it is.

  Some ask me why she didn’t give up earlier. The pain without drugs would have been bad. Others say that it was wrong for us not to ease her pain. But my mother said she wouldn’t die until she had something to leave her daughter.

  So we scatter her ashes with Fitz’s from the Prayer Tree and in the summer we finish a journey my father and Hannah began almost two decades ago. Jude arranges a house by the ocean with Griggs and his brother and Chaz and Raffy and Jessa and Narnie and me.

  While we watch the others throwing themselves into the surf, I sit with Jessa and Hannah, who cuddles us towards her.

  “I wanted to see the ocean,” she tells us, “and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, ‘What’s the difference between a trip and a journey?’ and my father said—”

  She stops for a moment, to catch her breath. “He said, ‘Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,’ and that was the last thing he ever said.”

  Jessa leans her head against her. “Hannah, do you think that your
mum and dad and Tate’s mum and dad and my mum and dad and Webb and Tate are all together someplace?” she asks earnestly.

  I look at Hannah, waiting for the answer. And then she smiles. Webb once said that a Narnie smile was a revelation and, at this moment, I need a revelation. And I get one.

  “I wonder,” Hannah says.

  Epilogue

  He sat in the tree, his mind overwhelmed by the idea that growing inside Tate was their baby. The cat purred alongside him, a co-conspirator in his contentment. Through the branches he could see Fitz coming his way, his gun balanced on his shoulders, whistling a tune. So Webb closed his eyes, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before where he sat on the branch of a tree and spoke to their child. In the child’s voice there was so much promise and joy that it took his breath away. He told her about his plans to build a house. He’d make it out of gopherwood, like Noah’s ark, two storeys high, with a view he could look out on every day with wonder. A house for Tate and Narnie and Jude and Fitz and for their families. A home to come back to every day of their lives.

  Where they would all belong or long to be.

  A place on the Jellicoe Road.

  Acknowledgements

  Mum, Dad, Marisa, Daniela, Brendan, Luca, and Daniel. Love you guys to oblivion.

  Thanks to all who ploughed through the manuscript in its most basic form and still managed to find words of encouragement: Mum, Anna Musarra, Ben Smith, Margaret Devery, Anthony Poniris, Lesley McFadzean, Siobhan Hannan, Sadie Chrestman, Barbara Barclay, Brother Eric Hyde. Special thanks to Maxim Younger, Patrick Devery, and Edward Hawkins for your thorough notes or extensive feedback.

  Much gratitude to Laura Harris and Christine Alesich, Lesley McFadzean, and everyone at Penguin Books, and Cameron Creswell, who make my life a bit less stressful!

  Thanks to Farrin Jacobs at US HarperCollins and Mary Arnold and the Printz Committee: Elizabeth Burns, Donna Cook, Alison Hendon, Caroline Kienzle, Ellen Loughran, Kevin Scanlon, Karyn Silverman, J. Marin Younker, Margaret Butzler, and Gillian Engberg.