I reach the bottom and smash into him with my fists as hard as I can. He falls and I can’t believe he goes down so easy, caught off-balance.
“You care about nothing, you piece of shit!”
I’m on the verge of tears, like I always seem to be these days, and I hear the catch in my voice and I hate myself for it. He throws me off him and I can tell there is a fury in him.
“
Never
,” he tells me in a tone full of ice, “under-estimate who or what I care for.”
I look over to where the bucket has tipped over and I notice that there’s no tar, no paint, there’s nothing. Just water. I look up at the trunk and everything is still intact, except for the glistening of the drops of water lodged inside the carvings.
He’s lying next to me and I don’t look at him but I hold out my hand to him.
“Truce?” I ask.
He takes my hand but doesn’t shake. Just holds it and it flops onto his chest, where I can feel his heart pounding. I’m not sure how to break the moment or how long we’re going to stay here, but there’s something so awkwardly peaceful about it all, lying under the Prayer Tree.
“Coffee?” Santangelo calls down to us. We both look up. He, Ben, and Raffy are hanging over the side.
“Is it espresso?” Anson Choi asks behind us.
“Freshly percolated,” Ben answers. “You should see the gadgets they have up here.”
Anson Choi aims a begging look at Griggs.
“You want to sell out over a coffee?” Griggs asks him with disgust.
“They’ve got muffins as well,” I tell them. “Double chocolate chip. His mum made them.”
Griggs gets up and holds out a hand to me. “Truce.”
By the second day of the holidays everyone has left the House. I ignore Jessa’s protests that she’d rather stay with me, first because I know she’ll drive me insane and second because I know she’s lying, which is confirmed when I see the look of excitement in her eyes when Santangelo’s mum and his sisters come to pick her up.
For the first two days I relish the peace and quiet and lack of questions and drama, and not having to share the television or the internet or even the snacks in the kitchen. By the time Raffy approaches the front verandah on the Wednesday, though, the company of Taylor Lily Markham is beginning to wear a bit thin.
“I’m bored to death,” she tells me. “Want to get out of town? Somewhere with a shopping centre?”
“It’ll take us ages to get there. By the time we walk down to town and take the coach…”
“Just say we’ve got a car?”
I look at her, puzzled.
“Santangelo has one,” she explains. “Keeps it in the old shed off the trail across the river.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugs. “I went to youth group on Saturday night.”
“Santangelo belongs to youth group?”
“No, but his girlfriend does, and I swear to God, the stuff I can get out of this girl is incredible. You see, Santangelo has to keep the car a secret because his father caught him doing five Ks over the speed limit.”
“Poor guy,” I say, thinking what a bummer it would be to have the police sergeant as your dad. But the sympathy doesn’t last long. “Keys?”
She scoffs at the idea. “No one in this town locks their doors, plus we can hotwire.”
There must be another confused look on my face because she explains. “It’s one of those Townie stories. Too long and insignificant, but being taught to hotwire has been pretty valuable.”
I’m liking the idea. Having access to a car for the holidays might even take me as far as Sydney.
The old shed is at least a thirty-minute walk, so we take the trail bikes and trespass into Cadet territory, hoping we don’t get caught. The Cadets are on a partial holiday. No school work, but plenty of hikes outside the area; so there’s no time like the present to violate the treaty.
It’s fun to be on the bikes again and I remember the times when I was in year nine, before we lost the trail to the Cadets, when we’d go flying over the twists and turns of the dirt road, racing one another across the most ridiculously dangerous terrain around. I broke my arm once by flying straight into a tree and Hannah didn’t talk to me for a week. But Hannah’s not around and Raffy and I race each other, both of us skidding off the bikes at least once. The scrape on my leg stings but I get there first and our adrenalin is so pumped that I’m ready to commit any felony, including breaking into the illegal car of the local sergeant’s son.
There’s something about the shabbiness of the dilapidated shed that makes me think that nothing could be driven into it without it falling apart. We
park the bikes at the back and with great difficulty pull open the two wooden doors. By the time we get them open we are saturated with perspiration and exhausted. But once we step inside, our fatigue changes to a sense of triumph. In front of us is an old but incredible shiny dark blue Commodore. As Raffy promised, the doors are unlocked and we circle it for a moment, celebrating the audacity of what we are about to do.
Raffy climbs in and disappears under the dashboard. I lean on the windowsill looking in as she pulls out wires and connects them like someone out of those movies that I have always been so dubious about because it’s always looked so easy.
“You are impressing me like crazy here,” I say to her.
“I can’t wait to tell him one day,” she says with a giggle. “‘Hey, Chaz, guess what? We knew where your precious car was all the time.’ I’d like to take a photo of his face. What do you think?”
The car begins to purr and I hear her “Yesss” of victory.
“I reckon I’d smile really nicely in the photo,” Santangelo says behind me, yanking me out of the
way, “knowing that you’ll be keeping it under your pillow for the rest of your life.”
He opens the car door and pulls her out, bumping her head on the way. Jonah Griggs is standing behind him, equally unimpressed.
“Don’t you
ever
touch my car again,” Santangelo says with the same fury he had on his face when Jonah Griggs made comments about his mother.
Raffy touches the car with her finger in a very dramatic way.
“You’ve just made our hit list,” he says, getting a hanky out of his pocket and cleaning off some imaginary mark. I haven’t seen a hanky in ages and seeing Santangelo with one makes it really difficult to keep a straight face.
“Oh, scary, scary,” Raffy says. “Let’s go, Taylor.”
“What are you guys up to?” I ask suspiciously. “Why are you hanging out together?”
“We’re not,” Santangelo says.
“Well, it looks like you are,” I say.
“We’re not,” Jonah Griggs says. “Believe me. His father’s made us paint half this town and if we stick around any longer he’ll make us paint the rest of it.”
“As a punishment for Gala Day?” Raffy asks.
“No. I think it was the Seven-Eleven thing,” he mutters, looking away.
“It could be because of that thing outside Woolworths,” Santangelo says. We didn’t know about that one. “My nanna Faye saw it and told my mum and she told my dad.”
“You guys have to stop the fighting,” Raffy says. “It’s passé. No one has punch-ups anymore.”
“This whole bloody town is passé,” Griggs says. “Can we just get out of here?”
“Are you going to smash him for that or will I?” Raffy asks Santangelo, glaring at Griggs.
I pull her away. “We’re out of here.”
We don’t look back. The trail bikes are prohibited for town use, so we go back to a world with no wheels but at least I have company in my boredom. Our shopping gets downsized to the two or three dress shops in town. It takes us longer to get to the Jellicoe Road from the garage than it would from our House but when we get there, Santangelo’s car is parked by the side of the trail.
“We can give you a lift,” he says grudgingly. Griggs is looking straight ahead as if he doesn’t give a shit.
“But just say we get finger marks on the seats?” I
ask. “Can we borrow your hanky?”
Raffy and I are both amused by my humour.
“Just don’t touch anything.”
Apart from the ride with Mr. Palmer on the night of my gaol visit, I haven’t been in a car for ages, especially during the day. There’s something so normal about it all, even if the guys in the front seat are your arch-enemies. Santangelo and Griggs have a massive argument about whose CD they put in first and Griggs wins, based on the logistics of Santangelo having his hands on the wheel. It’s a New Order song and from the moment the opening strands are over and the full passion of the music begins, I feel as if I am a thousand miles away from the turmoil of the past week. With the window down and my head out, I feel like everything inside of me is switched on. Santangelo is a good driver and knows every inch of the road, handling its turns and potholes effortlessly. I drift into a dreamy mode, to the beat of the music, and the dual voices of the singers make me close my eyes but still the colours around me penetrate my eyelids and I let them in. Flashes of greens and browns and greens and browns and…
“Stop!” I yell out. “Santangelo, stop!”
He comes to a screeching halt and we’re all thrown forward in our seats.
“What?” they’re all asking me at once.
“Are you okay?” Raffy asks.
I unlatch my seatbelt, get out of the car, and begin walking back down the road. I hear the slamming of three doors behind me and feel them following.
In front of us, on the side of the road, among weeds and ferns and rocks and tangled bushes, are a group of poppies. Surrounding them is a pebbled border, which seems to convey the message to keep clear. I’m staring at the flowers in amazement and then I look at Griggs.
“Do you guys jog along here?”
He shakes his head. “We go the other way.”
“What is it?” Raffy asks. “One of those roadside shrines or something?”
“Makes sense,” Santangelo says. “There was supposed to be the world’s worst accident here about twenty years ago.”
I turn to him. “Who died?”
He shrugs. “My dad would know, obviously. I think two families got wiped out. But they weren’t from here.”
Griggs is watching me carefully. “You okay?” he asks quietly.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to tell them the story. It’s like it belongs to me…and Hannah. I don’t know what’s true or not. Did Hannah know about those families?
“There’s this story,” I begin, “that they were planted by these kids who went to the Jellicoe School and one day they were destroyed by the Cadets while they were jogging. It was the first year the Cadets came. But the next day, one of the Cadets came back and he planted them again. With the kids, that is.”
“Where did you hear that?” Griggs asks.
“From Hannah.”
“The one who looks after you?”
I don’t answer. There’s just something about this spot. I turn around and look at the other side of the road where Jude first saw Narnie, thinking she was an apparition. They’re not real, I keep on telling myself. Those people aren’t real.
Griggs, Santangelo, and Raffy are looking at me closely and I walk back to the car.
Griggs convinces Santangelo that he should drive,
in case Santangelo’s dad sees us. “So where to?” he asks.
Santangelo turns around in the seat, looking at me. “I’ll show you the spot where they found something that belonged to the missing kid.”
“That’s morbid,” Raffy says.
“What missing kid?” Griggs asks.
Santangelo turns back around but I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and he looks away. Once again I get a sense that he knows something more than I do about my own life. I can’t imagine what it is but I suspect as the son of a policeman, he comes across all sorts of information. Stuck out at the school in the middle of a territory war, I have never had access to any information from town. Then again, I’ve never searched for it, because Jellicoe never seemed like anything more than a weak link between my mother and Hannah. Over the years I’d wondered sometimes if they had met while Hannah was at university in the city or maybe working in a pub someplace. Or maybe Hannah was a neighbour who felt an affinity for a single mother her age who couldn’t get through her day without a cocktail of alcohol, drugs, and pain-killers. Hannah could have
worked at the methadone clinic one of the times my mother tried to quit. But every time I spoke to Hannah about the connection between her and my mother she’d just ask, “Do you feel safe?” I’d shrug because I didn’t feel threatened and she’d say, “Then for the time being that has to be enough.”
But it was never enough. And I resent her more for it now than I ever have.
But Santangelo seems to know something and, more than anything, he seems willing to tell.
“Take us there,” I say quietly.
The spot is way on the other side of town. As we drive I follow the river, right through town and back out into the middle of nowhere again.
The place is almost as majestic as Hannah’s property. Big weeping willows shade the area by the river. Ropes hang off branches ready for swimmers to throw themselves into the water.
We sit, the four of us, watching the river, not saying much because it’s not as if we’re friends who have things in common to discuss. But strangely enough, it’s not awkward—just silent, apart from the typical nature soundtrack buzzing in the air. Once in a while
some little flying insect stations itself right in front of my nose and then it’s off doing a crazy three-sixty turn before flying away in a manic direction.
“You’re not another one who’s obsessed with that serial killer, are you?” I ask Santangelo.
“No.”
“Then why mention a boy who disappeared almost twenty years ago?”
“How do you know it was almost twenty years ago?” Santangelo asks.
“You said.”
“No he didn’t,” Griggs says, looking suddenly interested.
“And I didn’t say it was a boy.”
“Was it?” Griggs asks him.
Santangelo nods.
“I’ve probably been told about it before,” I say. I didn’t want to tell them about Hannah’s manuscript. “You?”
He shrugs, but I keep my focus on him until he fidgets uncomfortably. “I saw a photo of him once,” he says quietly. “It left an impression.”
“Because he was our age?” Raffy asks.
Santangelo thinks for a moment, as if he needs to
figure something out himself while trying to explain it to other people.
“Do you ever wonder how someone our age can possibly be dead? There’s just something really unnatural about it.”
I watch his face as he tries to explain.
“If you saw the photo you’d understand. You’d want to say to the kid in it, “Why weren’t you strong enough to resist death? Didn’t that look in your eye stop anything bad from happening to you?”
“But you’re not talking about someone’s age; now you’re talking about their spirit,” Raffy says.
“Maybe I am. It’s like when I was in year eight and we had to study
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I mean, she died of typhoid. Can you believe it? How could Anne Frank die of typhoid? The girl never kept her mouth shut, she was bloody annoying, and it was like nothing could kill what was inside of her. I thought, okay, maybe a gas chamber or a firing squad could kill her but not an illness that other people survived.”
I’m very disturbed to find out that the leader of the Townies has a soul and I’m beginning to develop a bit of a crush on him.
“At the end of the day it’s about heart beats and blood flow,” Griggs says flatly. “People’s spirits don’t keep them alive.”
Santangelo looks at me again. “The kid in the photo…his hair was kind of wavy, like a golden brown, and his eyes were that colour that’s not blue or green and he was smiling, so he had this kind of cut in his face. Not a real one. As if the smile made cuts in his cheek, but they weren’t dimples.”
Raffy and Griggs look at me. I stare out at the river.
“I saw you once,” Santangelo says, and I know he’s speaking to me. “It was about two years ago and you were sitting next to Raf. There was this performer at the Jellicoe fair. You know, one of those travelling Shakespeare slapstick comedies and you were laughing and you kind of—well, not to be insulting or anything because you don’t look like a boy anymore…the guys always say, ‘That Taylor Markham, she’s not too bad-looking,’ so I don’t want you to think that I think you look masculine because I swear to God you don’t, you look—”