On the Jellicoe Road Read online

  On the last Saturday of the holidays, Santangelo takes Griggs, Raffy, and me back to the place by the river on the other side of town. He’s convinced that there is some other clue down there to do with the missing boy and if there is one thing I’ve noticed about Santangelo, it’s that he has a touch of obsessive compulsive about him and won’t let an idea go.

  “Apparently the Hermit was obsessed with this river,” he tells us. “Why do you think that is?” he persists.

  I just shrug but I can tell Raffy and Griggs are trying to come up with something intelligent. When nobody answers he holds out his hands as if to say, “Go on, answer.”

  “Santangelo, you’re dying to tell us, so just tell us,” Griggs says, irritated.

  “Because I think he knew that kid, Xavier.”

  “Webb,” I say, and the three of them look at me. “That’s what they called him.”

  “Webb.” He nods. “Well, think of this river. There are so many bends where stuff going down the river gets lodged.”

  “Stuff?” I ask. “Wow. Hold back on the jargon.”

  “So let’s go in,” Griggs says.

  “It’s deep and by the time you get to the bottom and check out what’s down there, you’ll have to come back up again for breath.”

  “I’ll go down,” Raffy said. “I’m the fifteen-hundred-metre swimmer and can hold my breath the longest.”

  I watch the guys. It’s as if she’s stripped them of their masculinity.

  “It’s no big deal. It’s just about better lungs,” she reassures them, turning to face me and rolling her eyes as she takes off her shoes and socks. The guys are not coping and I sit back and hug my knees to watch the show.

  “How do you know Griggs isn’t a long-distance swimmer who has fantastic lungs?” Santangelo asks.

  “Because he looks like a Rugby player, not a swimmer,” Raffy tells him. “You look like an AFL player, not a swimmer. I look like a swimmer.”

  “What about me?” I ask.

  The three of them look at me. Being tall has never meant I was labelled as athletic. Just lanky.

  “You look like someone who can wipe out the opposition in a chess game,” Raffy says.

  “I won the table tennis title two years in a row,” I remind her.

  “But you’re not a swimmer,” she says.

  “You only beat me in the fifteen-hundred that one time,” Santangelo says.

  I can tell this could go on forever and I’m not in the mood. “Look,” I say, “he beat you in the spelling bee. She beat you in the fifteen-hundred metres. Let’s just get this Fab Four adventure over and done with and go home.”

  “I think two of us should go in,” Raffy says, taking off her top.

  “Look the other way,” Santangelo tells Griggs as she unzips her jeans.

  “As if.”

  When Raffy is down to her undies and singlet, she dives in with ease. Her head emerges, her teeth chattering. Santangelo begins to strip as well and I certainly don’t look the other way.

  As soon as Santangelo and Raffy’s heads go under, Griggs leans over and kisses me. It’s a hungry kind of kiss, like he’s been dying to do it for ages and he can’t get enough but after a while I open my eyes and just stare at him.

  “You’re supposed to close your eyes,” he says, a little unnerved.

  “I’m not supposed to do anything,” I say, moving away from him and looking into the river, waiting for Raffy and Santangelo to come back up.

  “Is there a problem here?”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “Really? Because that wasn’t the message you were giving me last Saturday night.”

  “And between last Saturday and today there have been at least six days, so let’s just say that I’m going by the message that you’ve been giving me since then.”

  “We’ve been surrounded by the Santangelo circus and that little pest who is either attached to you surgically or me and then, when they’re not around, Casanova Cassidy is hanging off every word you say or Raffy is giving me one of those ‘girl zone only’ looks,” he says. “So if I haven’t been giving you the attention—”

  “So you’re admitting it. That you can just switch this on and off?”

  “Yeah, whatever you say. I’m over it.”

  “Good, because I was never into it!”

  I feel like someone off Jerry Springer. Any moment now I’m going to be saying “boyfriend” with a bit of Afro-American attitude thrown in but I can’t help it.

  Santangelo emerges and I feel horrible because I’ve almost forgotten that they’re down there. He swings around looking for Raffy and I move closer to the river until her head appears.

  “Anything?” I ask, as if there was a likelihood that they would find something constructive, just because we were looking for it.

  “No,” Santangelo says, dragging himself out. “But there are heaps of tree trunks lying on the bottom and anything could be stuck in or under them.”

  Santangelo comes up with yet another idea about getting some diving material for a better search, but I’m not listening anymore and neither is Griggs.

  Santangelo and Raffy drop us off on the Jellicoe Road and I get out without saying a word and walk away, but Griggs is right behind me.

  “So explain to me again what I did wrong.”

  I don’t stop. “You know what? You didn’t do anything wrong. I did. It’s this dumb thing I do. I look into things and see more than I’m supposed to.”

  “You’re implying that last week meant nothing to me.”

  This time I do stop, staring at him. “It’s not an implication. It’s a fact. Just like when we ran away. No big deal, Griggs.”

  “It was a big deal, so why are you pretending that it isn’t?”

  “No. It wasn’t. It was just a coincidence. We were waiting for the same train, for the same reason—to go see our mothers—and maybe being together meant more to me than it did to you. Maybe I’ve got to stop believing that everyone feels the same way I do about things.”

  Like my mother, I want to say to him. Like Hannah. Like you.

  “I wrote to you for a year and you never wrote back,” he says. “I rang you over and over again and you would never come to the phone. What part of that gives the impression that I didn’t care?”

  “You know what I think,” I tell him. “You thought I was too much baggage. Or maybe you got bored. Like she would have. She’d get bored being good. She’d get bored trying to go clean. She got bored being my mother. And I wanted to ask her why, but you switched off and you rang the Brigadier to come and get you when I was so close to where I wanted to be and I can’t believe that you preferred to miss out on seeing your mum and brother just so you wouldn’t have to spend another moment with me.”

  He shakes his head like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I didn’t ring the Brigadier,” he snaps. “I didn’t even know him at the time and one day, when you’re interested, I might tell you why I rang my school. But for the time being why don’t you just continue feeling sorry for yourself and comparing the rest of the world with your mother. That will make you popular.” He crosses the road, but not without a parting look of such hostility that it makes me ill.

  “There will be no ‘one day,’” I yell. “Because holidays are over, Griggs, and you and I are never going to cross paths again. Not in the next ten days. Not ever! Have a fantastic life.”

  He walks back towards me and I take a step back, not because I’m scared but because he doesn’t give me much room and this is Griggs without control. Apart from the train and that time in the scout hall, I’ve never seen him like this. I’ve seen measured Griggs who provokes the fight, who is never taken by surprise, who walks at his own pace to the beat of life. But not Griggs like he is now.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” he says with quiet menace, “because I’m about this close to telling you to get the fuck out of my life.”

  I stare at him.

  “What d
o you want from me?” he asks.

  What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him.

  More.

  But I don’t say anything and neither of us move.

  “What if I told you that I lied that day on the platform?” he says after a moment.

  “You’re lying now,” I say angrily. “Don’t you dare try to get out of the fact that you were missing your mother and brother and you wanted to see them. You were a mess. I was there, remember?”

  He shakes his head. “I lied.”

  “Am I supposed to think you’re all tough because you don’t need people, Griggs? Is that what you’re trying to do here?”

  “No, that’s your thing.”

  “Then stop lying, and admit you were there because you missed your family.”

  “I’ve missed my mother and brother every day that I’ve been out here this time round. But not that day.”

  There is something in his eyes that frightens the hell out of me and I want to walk away. I don’t want to hear another word because I know that whatever he has to say is going to destroy a part of me.

  “I knew who you were before that day,” he says. “Some morbid prick pointed you out to me in the street when I arrived here that first year. Told me how some Hermit had whispered something in your ear and then blown his brains out.”

  The words are brutal. I’ve never really heard it described that way. I block my ears for a moment but when you block your ears you tend to close your eyes and when I close my eyes I see blood and brain-matter and I smell the sickly scent of blood.

  “So you were at the train station and saw me come along and you thought I’d be a fun person to hang out with for a weekend?” I say snidely. “And you made up some story about wanting to see your mother and brother?”

  “No, I was waiting for the train. The three forty-seven to Yass. Comes every afternoon and, according to the station master, it’s never late and I knew that. And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. My mum wouldn’t. She told me later that she couldn’t, because she was scared to see that I might hate her. She feels like she didn’t protect me from him. But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can’t do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.”

  “Do what to me? I don’t think that leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs,” I lie.

  “You being on that platform changed mine.”

  This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.

  “I wasn’t there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass,” he says. “I was there to throw myself in front of it.”

  Chapter 18

  On the last day of the holidays, Santangelo sends word through the Cadets that he has something I want. Which makes me wonder: how the hell does Santangelo know what I want when I don’t even know? And does getting what I want just mean more confusion?

  “It’s a trick,” Raffy says. “He just wants to talk Club House and he thinks the territory wars are over because you and Griggs pashed. Let’s not go.”

  But she doesn’t look me in the eye and I know that Raffy is scared that whatever we find out about Webb will change everything for me.

  “I’m going,” I tell her flatly and firmly. But I think I hear a pleading in my voice when I ask, “Are you coming?”

  Santangelo organises to meet us at the scout hall, except the scouts are meeting there, so it ends up being on the steps of the water tower in the middle of town. I begin to understand his desperate need for the Club House and the Townies’ need for a place to go.

  Raffy and I take Jessa with us because not everyone’s back yet from holidays. While we wait for him, I tell them the story of the kids in Hannah’s manuscript. I try to tell it in sequence and at times it gets hard, but they are mesmerised. Jessa makes me repeat the story of the boy who came riding by on the stolen bike at least twice.

  “He crawls in through the back passenger’s window of the car on top,” I explain to them, “and the first person he finds is Narnie. Except Narnie won’t move. She’s petrified and he begs her to come out with him but she won’t. The other two, Tate and Webb, are pleading with her, ‘Come on Narnie. Please.’ They had begun to smell petrol and were terrified the cars would blow. Then Narnie leans over and she whispers something into the ear of the boy who came by on the stolen bike. Tate and Webb say later that the look on his face was one of horror and they just cried. They think that Narnie has asked him to let her stay there and die. So he begins with them. First Tate and then Webb. He takes them out and places them under a tree and he makes them promise not to move. He tells them that if they don’t move, he just might be able to convince Narnie to come out. Five minutes later, Narnie comes out with him and he lays her down beside her brother and tells Webb not to let her out of his sight. They ask him where he’s going but he doesn’t answer. Then he goes back into those cars four more times and he carries out the bodies of Tate’s mum and then Tate’s dad and then Tate’s sister and then Webb and Narnie’s father. He places them on the other side of the road.”

  “What about Narnie and Webb’s mum?” Jessa asks.

  I shake my head. It’s the part of the story I do not want to tell.

  “Anyway,” I continue, “not even two minutes later, the cars blow up.”

  “He could have died,” Jessa says in a hushed voice.

  I nod. “And he knew that, but all his life he’d been treated like crap to the point that he believed he was crap. He’d never done anything good and nobody had ever said anything positive about him. But that night, on the Jellicoe Road, it was like he was reborn. The lives he saved gave him purpose and he loved those kids more than anything.”

  “So where’s the rest of the story?” Raffy asks.

  “I left the manuscript on the floor in Hannah’s house and the Brigadier stole it.”

  “Why?”

  I shrug but Jessa can’t contain herself. “Because he’s the serial killer.”

  Raffy is irritated. “Don’t say that in front of Chaz. The Santangelo household is in a state of fear because of you, Jessa. Enough about the serial killer,” she says firmly.

  “Do you think they’re real? Those people in Hannah’s story?” Jessa asks.

  “Yes I do,” I say. And it’s the first time I’ve said out loud that Hannah’s story is real.

  “Why can’t we just get the rest of the manuscript?” Jessa asks.

  “How? Knock on his tent and say, ‘Yoo-hoo, remember me? I threw a stretcher bed at you. Can I have the manuscript back?’”

  “According to Teresa and the boy she’s going around with, the Brigadier hasn’t been there during the holidays. He doesn’t get back until tomorrow.”

  “How does Teresa know that?” Raffy asks.

  “Teresa’s in a relationship with one of the Cadets. They’re going ‘around’ with each other,” I explain patiently.

  “The Cadets are the enemy,” Raffy says. “We’re not supposed to be conducting relationships with them.”

  I nod in agreement.

  “Although the whole town is talking about the snog you and Griggs—”

  “Enough about that,” I snap. “It was a one-off.”

  “What’s a one-off?” Santangelo asks as he arrives.

  Raffy looks at me, knowing I’ll lose it if she mentions it again. “Nothing,” she mutters.

  Jessa has already run off with Santangelo’s sister, Tilly, and the three of us are left beating around the bush until Raffy holds out her hand.

  “What have you got?” she says to him.

  “It’s not about the territory wars.”

  Her hand is still out and he looks at me because mine isn’t. Then he reluctantly hands over an envelope.

  “It’s a photo,” he says. “I got it from the file at the station.”
r />   A photo that I am dying to see, although I’m sure something inside of me will die from seeing it.

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” he asks.

  I watch Jessa and Tilly swing off the stairs of the water tower like monkeys without a care in the world. “Be careful,” Santangelo calls out to them.

  It takes me a moment to find my voice. “If I look at the photo and whoever it is looks exactly like me, that only means he can be my father, and if he’s the boy who’s been missing for eighteen years, it means that my father is dead and I’ve never thought that. Ever.”

  “Then don’t look at it,” Raffy says. “You know you had a father, Taylor. You were on his shoulders and you lay between him and your mother. It was the first thing you told me in year seven. Remember?”

  I nod. “And then I told you something else.”

  She looks at me. “But the shoulders of the giant is a better story.”

  I remember love. It’s what I have to keep on reminding myself. It’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love.

  “Then I’ll take it back,” Santangelo says. “Maybe memories should be left the way they are.”

  I can feel Raffy’s eyes on me and I lean over and take the envelope gently out of her hands. “Thanks, Raf, but I think this belong to me.”

  I do the count to ten that always reaches eleven and then begin again. Until I find the guts to look.

  He’s the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and it’s not about his face but the life force I can see in him. It’s the smile and the pure promise of everything he has to offer. Like he’s saying, “Here I am, world; are you ready for so much passion and beauty and goodness and love and every other word that should be in the dictionary under the word life?” Except this boy is dead and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to pull my hair out with Tate’s and Narnie’s and Fitz’s and Jude’s grief all combined. It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn’t believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.