Finally we came to an agreement about the Club House and a week before the Cadets are due to leave, we have the opening. My heart’s not really in it and the only people who seem enthusiastic are Ben and Anson Choi and the Mullet Brothers, who have spent every possible moment with each other pretending they are a band.
It amazes me that we’ve got this far, so I suppose that’s something to celebrate. But the thing is we don’t know how to. Thirty people from each faction, ninety people all up, stand around staring at one another with absolutely nothing to say. There’s a stage, a drink machine, and a few tables and chairs but apart from that, there’s nothing else. No personality. No conversation. No atmosphere. Nicht. Nix.
Raffy stands next to me, commiserating, and
for once I wish someone would start a fight just to introduce noise to the place. On the other side of the room, Griggs is standing against the wall with that stony look on his face while the rest of the Cadets are huddled in his corner. One of the guys next to him is even clutching a chessboard, like he was forced here in the middle of a game. In another corner Santangelo looks slightly bored, even with his girlfriend hanging off him, and behind me I can feel Richard’s eyes drilling into me as if I am the creator of this hell.
But then I catch Griggs’s eye and he looks at me in a way that tells me exactly what he’s feeling and I love that look. Suddenly I want to yell out to everyone, “
It’s a game, these territory wars. They loved each other
.”
Instead I turn to Raffy. “See the guy standing next to Jonah Griggs?” I say. “Their chess champ. Apparently no one can beat him.”
She looks at me as if to say,
Who cares
?
“As if,” I hear Richard say.
“It’s true. Jonah Griggs reckons he’s a freak and that they’ve beaten every GPS School in Sydney.”
“You know what I heard,” Raffy says, catching
on. “That he thinks that no one in this area could possibly beat anyone from the city.”
Richard glares at the guy, and I see the challenge in his eye.
“It’d be great if someone took him down a peg or two,” I say, walking away. I approach Griggs, watching as he lifts himself off the wall, not quite sure what he has to prepare himself for, but with a look of relief on his face.
“What?” he asks. There’s vulnerability in his face and I sense that our last session together affected him just as badly as it did me. There are a million things I want to say to him but in the end it seems safer talking about this debacle.
I lean in, trying not to seem too friendly to the rest of the world. “This is a disaster,” I whisper.
“Seen bigger and better ones.” He makes room between him and the chess guy and I feel our fingers touch slightly but neither of us moves away.
“See the guy you punched out the other day?” I say a bit louder. “He’s our chess champ. He thinks no one can beat him.”
He looks at me as if to say,
Who cares?
“As if,” I hear the guy with the chessboard say.
“It’s true. He’s a freak and his team has beaten every school in the country comp.”
“He’s up himself,” Griggs says, catching on. “Choi reckons he heard him say that no GPS School from the city is ever going to beat him and his team.”
The guy with the chessboard glares at Richard and I see that challenge in his eye. He moves away from us and stands huddled with some other guys, who follow his gaze towards Richard.
“I reckon I could take them all on,” I tell Griggs quietly.
“You play chess?”
“I can beat him with my eyes closed. Why do you think Richard hates me so much?”
“Because you turn him on and it kills him that he doesn’t turn you on,” he says, looking at me.
“How do you know?” I grin. “That he doesn’t turn me on, that is?”
He laughs and I see that people are watching us. “What do you think would happen if we kissed right here, right now?” he asks, digging his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, grinning right back at me.
“I think it would cause a riot.”
“Well, you know me,” he says, lowering his head
towards me. “Causing a riot is what I do best.”
Santangelo approaches before Griggs gets any closer and pulls him away. “Are you guys insane?” he says, irritated.
“It’s called peaceful coexistence, Santangelo. You should try it and if it works we may sell the idea to the Israelis and Palestinians,” I say, throwing his own words back at him.
“This isn’t peaceful coexistence. This is the worst idea I’ve ever come up with. Everyone’s miserable.”
“I’m not,” Griggs says. “It’s easy.” He beckons over some of the Cadets and introduces me to the first two. “They guarded the hostages,” he tells me. Santangelo already seems to know them. Some of the Townies, who I recognise from the night at the party, come over and shake hands with Griggs and his guys.
I see Trini from Darling House in the crowd and wave her over. She looks hesitant so I drag two Cadets over to her. “These are the guys who looked after our year-seven trio,” I say, looking at them with slightly exaggerated gratitude. “Guarded them with their lives.”
The boys blush in unison.
“Griggs was telling me how it keeps him awake
at night thinking of the fear he put in the hearts of those girls,” I say, looking at Griggs.
Trini and her friend look shocked at this news and Griggs gives a shrug. “I presume you are the one responsible for how brilliantly they composed themselves in such a harrowing situation,” he says with such charm. He even accompanies it with a disarming smile.
The girls beam. “We are very strict but fair. Would you like to come and meet the other House seniors?” Trini asks the two Cadets. They nod and another five or six guys follow them across the room.
“We are so sick of each other’s company,” Griggs tells us, watching his guys being introduced to the Darling House girls. “Everyone’s hanging to go home.”
I look at him and feel a sick twist in my stomach. In ten days’ time I will never see Jonah Griggs again. Ever. He looks at me as if he knows what I’m thinking.
Even Santangelo seems flat. “I regret the no-alcohol rule,” he says as we make our way to where some guy is making espressos.
By the time we’ve had our second coffee, the
chess game between the Murrumbidgee guys and the Cadets is well and truly underway in one corner. On the other side of the room the Darling girls are surrounded by Cadets while the girls from Hastings House look on in total envy. Then the band comes on and I hate to admit it but they kind of make everything worthwhile. It’s hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he’s playing the saxophone. Whoever’s not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.
Ben plays his violin like a madman and even the Mullet Brothers look cool, having grown sideburns for the occasion. One stares into space in that vacuous way most bass guitarists do and the other does these pirouettes in the air every time he jumps. Unfortunately they only have three songs but the music helps break the ice.
The drummer waves at Raffy and she walks over to the side of the stage to chat with him.
“Who’s that?” Santangelo asks, offering me some chips.
“The arsonist from Clarence House,” I say with my mouth half full.
From the stage Ben catches my eye. “This is for them, Taylor,” he calls out as they begin to play. It’s a song by the Waterboys and, like each time I hear the music played by the boy in the tree in my dreams, I experience a bittersweet sense of nostalgia I have no right to own. When it’s time for Ben to play his solo—his eyes closed, his mind anywhere but here, his fingers so taut and precise that it almost looks painful—my eyes well with tears. Because you know from the look on Ben’s face that he’s somewhere you want to be. Somewhere the five would be each time they were together. The place goes off. I can feel Griggs’s shoulder against mine and I hear him mutter something under his breath.
“What?” I say, irritated. “He’s fantastic.”
There’s a look on his face that I don’t recognise and I don’t quite get it until Ben jumps off the stage, surrounded by Townie girls.
“Hey!” Griggs calls out to him. “Violin guy!”
Ben points to himself with that
who me?
look, walking towards us.
Griggs doesn’t say anything for a moment, but
then he clears his throat. “If I had known…I wouldn’t have gone for your fingers that time.”
“You would have just chosen another body part?” Ben says.
“Probably. But not the fingers.”
Ben nods. “Cheers.” He looks pleased with himself. “I have numbers in this phone that I didn’t have at the beginning of the night,” he says, waving it around.
“No coverage,” Griggs reminds him.
“And mobile numbers are blocked on our land-lines,” I add.
“Thanks for the optimism.”
Ben sees Santangelo still staring at Raffy and the drummer and pats him on the back.
“Nothing to worry about. He set fire to her hair once in science and I think that killed the romance for her.”
“Why would I be worried?” Santangelo asks, irritated, as Raffy walks back towards us.
“You should be worried,” Ben says. “Because you’re going out with that chick and Raff will go out with some guy and you’ll spend the whole time with this ‘thing’ hovering between you and then you’ll
get married to other people and one day when you’re middle-aged in your thirties, while both your kids are going to the same school, you’re going to have this affair because of all the pent-up attraction and ruin the lives of everyone in the P and F.”
“Your friends are freaks,” Santangelo tells Raffy when she re-joins us.
“Chaz, I’ve always had freaks for friends. You should know that.”
I look over at Richard, who is clearly dominating the chess game and I nudge Griggs. “Want me to teach you how to play speed chess?” I ask.
I spend the next half hour annihilating Richard and then we play doubles. The head nerd of the Cadets is my partner and when it’s over he asks me for my number. I’m very flattered and he looks a bit crestfallen when I say no.
“It’s because they don’t have coverage out here,” Griggs tells him.
“No,” I say, looking up at Griggs. “It’s actually because my heart belongs to someone else.” And if I could bottle the look on his face, I’d keep it by my bedside for the rest of my life.
One day Tate was there, a ghost of Tate, sitting by the river where Webb had planned to build a house—a dead look in her eye, a thin grimace to her lips, a sick pallor to her skin that spoke of despair. The next day she was gone—bags packed, no note. And for Narnie, hours without them went by, and then days, and then weeks. And in between those seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks was the most acute sense of loneliness she’d ever experienced. Sometimes she knew that Fitz was watching her and she would call out, “Fitzee. Please! Don’t leave me!”
But no one came back.
Except Jude.
As predicted, the Club House is profitable and after three nights we split the money between the
three factions and then we split it again between the Houses. The leaders have a meeting about what their Houses are going to do with the funds and I nod with great approval as everyone is united in their maturity and pragmatism.
Richard has made plans for a maths computer tutor for his house while Ben buys a guitar for his. Trini organises a year’s subscription with Greenpeace and I mumble about some books and DVDs for our library or maybe some software for the computer.
“Let’s get something we can have the bestest fun we’ve ever had with,” Jessa begs one night when we’re on washing-up duty.
“We’re not here to have fun,” I say.
“Who said?” one of the year tens asks me. I think about it for a moment and then shrug.
“I actually don’t know. It’s not that effective when you don’t know, is it?”
So we get a karaoke machine.
On the first night, the year tens stage a competition, insisting that every member of the House has to be involved, so we clear the year-seven and-eight dorms and wait for our turn. Raffy is on second and does an impressive job of “I Can’t Live, If Living
Means Without You” but then one of the seniors points out to her that she’s chosen a dependency song and Raffy spends the whole night neuroticising about it.
“I just worked out that I don’t have ambition,” she says while one of the year eights sings tearfully, “Am I Not Pretty Enough?” I start compiling a list of all the kids I should be recommending to the school counsellor, based on their song choices.
“I think she’s reading a little too much into it, Raf.”
“No she isn’t. Because do you know what my second and third choices were? ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ and ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself.’”
“Mary Grace chose ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ and she’s got blue eyes and Serina sang ‘It’s Raining Men’ and she’s a lesbian. You’re taking this way too seriously. Let it go.”
“What have you chosen?”
“I’m doing something with Jessa. Apparently her father was a Lenny Rogers fan.”
“Kenny,” she corrects. “‘Coward of the County’?”
I look at her suspiciously. “Why that one? Are
you implying I’m a coward?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just one of his well-known ones.”
“Why didn’t you say ‘The Gambler’? That’s pretty well known, according to Jessa. I’d rather be a gambler than a coward.”
“It’s just a song,” she insists. But I’m not convinced.
I get up and sing “Islands in the Stream” with Jessa. As usual, she takes it all very seriously and she does these hands expressions as if she’s clutching her heart and then giving it out to the audience. I refuse to follow but I do enjoy it. We have knockout rounds throughout the week after dinner and it’s during this time that I truly get to know my House. Their choices make me laugh so much at times that I have tears running down my face and other times they are so poignant that they make me love them so much without even trying.
Raffy and I spend every other night in the Prayer Tree with Santangelo and Griggs. Each time we set out an agenda, which lists the Club House and the territory boundaries as items for discussion, but it
never quite happens. We just end up talking about stuff, like the meaning of life or the importance of karaoke choices.
“Do you think they define you?” Raffy asks them.
“Hope not. I always end up singing some Michael Jackson song,” Santangelo says.
“What did you pick?” Griggs asks me.
“Kenny Rogers.”
“‘Coward of the County’?”
I sit back and don’t say a word. I am wounded. Griggs looks at me and then at Raffy. “I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?” he asks.
She doesn’t say anything out loud, but I know she’s mouthing something to him because next minute he says, “I meant ‘The Gambler.’”
I still don’t say anything.
“At the end he saves Becky.” Santangelo tries to help. “Remember? Everyone considered him the coward of the county but he actually wasn’t one.”
“It’s frightening that you’ve put so much analysis into it,” Griggs says.
“It’s not me,” Santangelo says. “You know what fathers with bad taste in music are like.”
Except Griggs doesn’t, and I can tell Santangelo feels like shit for saying it.
“My mum’s boyfriend listens to Cold Chisel,” Griggs says, trying to make Santangelo feel better. “He’s taught my brother all the words to ‘Khe San.’ They sing it all the time.”
Santangelo doesn’t say anything and I can tell he’s angry with himself.
For a while there is silence. Outside, the first cicadas of the season are humming and it’s like there’s no one else in the world but the four of us. It’s Griggs who breaks the silence.
“I loved him, you know,” he says quietly. The admission doesn’t surprise me as much as the fact that he’s speaking about it. “That would probably shock people. But I did. I look exactly like him. Same build, same face. I know every part of my personality that I got from my father. He was a prick, except even pricks don’t deserve to be smashed over the head with a cricket bat.”
“That’s debatable,” Raffy says.
“Do you want to know the worst part?” he asks. I can tell this is so hard for him because he won’t look at us. “Sometimes I forget just how bad he
was, so all I can remember is that he’s dead because of me. It’s unnatural, what I did. Sometimes I’m thinking about it in the middle of class and I’ll walk out and ring my mum and say, ‘I remember that he took us to the circus, and that we were laughing, so why did I do what I did?’ She always has an answer. ‘And that night he smashed my head against the glass cabinet, Jonah. Do you remember that? And when he burnt your brother with the cigarettes, Jonah?’
“Other times I’ll wake her in the middle of the night and say, ‘He told me that no one loved us as much as he did.’ And she’ll say, ‘And then he walked around the house holding a gun, threatening to kill us all, because he wanted us to be together forever.’”
Griggs looks up at us. “What happens when she’s not my memory anymore? What happens when she’s not around to tell me about his belt leaving scars across my two-year-old brother’s face or when he whacked her so hard that she lost her hearing for a week? Who’ll be my memory?”
Santangelo doesn’t miss a beat. “I will. Ring me.”
“Same,” Raffy says.
I look at him. I can’t even speak because if I do
I know I’ll cry but I smile and he knows what I’m thinking.
“So, getting back to the karaoke thing,” says Griggs, not wanting to deal with too much emotion. “I’d have to go with…” He thinks for a moment. “Guns n’ Roses, ‘Paradise City.’”
“Oh, please,” I say. “I’d rather be the coward of the county.”
“Guns n’ Roses have such skanky hos in their film clips,” Raffy says.
“And the problem being?” Santangelo asks.
It’s after midnight when Griggs takes something out of his pocket and puts it in front of me.
“You dropped them in the Brigadier’s tent.”
I stare at the photos in front of me. I’m not ready for more photos. Not after we’ve been talking about Jonah’s father and unprofound lyrics and skanky hos.
“You can take them home with you,” he says, “and look at them there.”
I still don’t say anything. I want to but I can’t. I want to explain everything that’s going on in my head but I can’t find the words.
“Who are they of?” Raffy asks quietly.
“Just a bunch of kids our age,” Jonah says.
I reach over with a shaking hand and put the pictures face up on the ground between us. So I can introduce them to the original five.
They are everything I imagined and more.
“Hannah,” I say, pointing to one. She’s much younger but I’d know her anywhere. “This is the Cadet,” I say to them. “He helped them plant their poppies at the spot where their families died.”
“Is that Fitz?” Raffy asks, pointing to the tallest of them.
I nod, swallowing hard. “Who came by on the stolen bike and saved their lives.” My voice cracks, just a bit.
I look at Fitz for a long time. He is as wild as I knew he would be but so cheeky-looking. I almost expect him to leap out of the photograph and tap me on the face.
“I feel like I know him and I don’t know why,” Raffy says.
“He was a Townie,” I say.
Santangelo looks at the photo and then at me, slightly puzzled. “Is he…”
I nod.
“Who?” Raffy asks.
Santangelo holds the photo in his hand and I see a blurry tear that he, embarrassed, quickly dashes away.
“The Hermit,” I say, and I hear a sound come from Raffy but before I react, I see something else. Standing next to him in the picture, with an arm around his neck, is Webb. A smile from ear to ear, a look in his eyes so joyous that a second wave of grief comes over me. To be that boy, I think. To feel whatever he was feeling. It makes me feel sick and overwhelmed at the same time.
“Webb,” I say. “He began the territory wars,” I tell them. “But it was a joke. I mean, his best friends were Cadets and Townies and the only reason the boundaries came about was because they were bored and just wanted to hang out with each other.”
“Who’s that?” Griggs says, pointing.
It’s like my heart stops beating. All because of the person standing at the edge. Tate. Looking up at Webb with a mixture of love and exasperation, as if they are the only two in the world. She is so beautiful that it makes me ache and I can hardly breathe. The others look at me questioningly because there
are tears in my eyes and I’m just shaking my head.
“She’s so beautiful,” I whisper.
I look up at them. “See how beautiful she was.”
“Was? Who is she?” Griggs asked, confused by my reaction.
I pick up the photo and study it closely. But her eyes refuse to meet mine because, for her, there was never anyone but Webb.
“Her name’s Tate,” I tell them. “She’s my mother.”
I lie in my bed, still clutching the photos. It’s one in the morning and I know what I have to do. All this time I thought the answers were here. But now I know that Tate took those answers with her and that somehow Hannah’s caught up in it. If I had to wish for something, just one thing, it would be that Hannah would never see Tate the way I did. Never see Tate’s beautiful lush hair turn brittle, her skin sallow, her teeth ruined by anything she could get her hands on that would make her forget. That Hannah would never count how many men there were and how vile humans can be to one another. That she would never see the moments in my life
that were full of neglect and fear and revulsion, moments I can never go back to because I know they will slow me down for the rest of my life if I let myself remember them for one moment. Tate, who had kept Hannah alive that night, reading her the story of Jem and Mrs. Dubose. And suddenly I know I have to go but this time without being chased by a Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breathe for the rest of my life.
When I get to the end of the clearing that leads to the Jellicoe Road, a part of me is not surprised to see Griggs standing there. Even though it’s two in the morning and pitch black, I know it’s Griggs. We stand looking at each other, not able to see much in the darkness, but I can feel his presence.
I ask the inevitable. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you?”
“I asked first.”
“Does it matter who asked first?”
I begin to walk away. “Don’t follow me, Jonah.”
“I’ve got a car,” he calls out after me. “And you’ve
got somewhere to go.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I have this amazing ability to read your mind, that’s why.”
I stop for a moment. “Do you want me to remind you what happened last time? I don’t ever want to be that angry with you again, Jonah. I just want to get past Yass this time and find her.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“Oh, so you were reading her mind back then, too, were you? Is that why you called your school?”
“No, but just say I was reading yours and it was kind of saying, ‘Whatever I find out there is going to kill me a bit inside.’ And I know what you’re thinking now. That if you can find Hannah, you can find your mother.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, but I walk back to him and we take the track that leads to the garage.
And he
is
wrong. Because I was thinking the exact opposite. If I find my mother, it will lead me to Hannah.
Once we get off the Jellicoe Road, we stop at Santangelo’s and text him to meet us outside. He
comes out, barefoot and bleary-eyed, holding something in his hands, and Griggs gets out of the car to greet him. They talk for a while but I don’t want to join in. I’m scared that everyone’s going to try to talk me out of this. Santangelo comes to my window and pokes his head in.
“Soon as I got home I burnt you a CD,” he says, handing it to me.
I nod.
“Take this,” he says, putting some notes in my hand. “It’s the Club House share. GI Joe won’t take it.”
“No.”
“
Yes
. Pay me back later. The petrol alone will cost you a fortune and I can’t promise this car will last.”
Griggs opens the car door. “We’ve got to go.”
Santangelo leans through the window and hugs me. “Raffy will kill me,” he whispers.
He goes around to Griggs’s side and they do that awkward thing where they can’t acknowledge that they actually have a friendship. After standing around for a moment or two, they shake hands.