Текст книги "On the Jellicoe Road "

Автор книги: Melina Marchetta

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

“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 and 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?”

“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.