On the Jellicoe Road

“You know what I’m going to do when I get back to camp, Choi?” Griggs says a bit too cheerfully.

“What, Griggs?”

“I’m going to write a letter to my next-door neighbour. She’s my girlfriend. We’re madly in love.”

Raffaela gives me a sideways glance and I can tell she’s trying not to laugh and I realise what Griggs found so amusing when he was talking to the Townie girls.

“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, Griggs.” Anson Choi feigns surprise. “What’s her name?”

“I didn’t actually catch her name,” Griggs continues.

“Lily,” Raffaela says over her shoulder and this time I give her a sideways look.

“Great to know that I’m in love with a girl with a cool name.”

“It’s Taylor’s middle name,” Raffaela calls back again.

Placing Raffaela in the path of an oncoming car becomes one of the major priorities of the next ten seconds of my life.

“So apart from writing letters home to your fantasy girlfriends,” Ben says, walking backwards, “what do you guys do out here without television and phones?”

“Men’s business. Bit confidential,” Griggs says patronisingly.

“Wow, wish I were you,” Ben says, shaking his head with mock regret. “All I’ll be doing tonight is hanging out in Taylor’s bedroom, lying on her bed, sharing my earphones with her, hoping she won’t hog all the room because it’s such a tiny space.”

He gives them a wave. “Now you have fun with your men’s business and spare a thought for my plight.”

Griggs and Ben compete in a who-can-outstare-each-other-longer competition until Anson Choi drags Griggs away to the other side of the road.

I look at Ben then Raffaela. “What was that all about?” I whisper angrily. “The Lily thing and the hanging out in Taylor’s bedroom?”

They both have a what-did-we-do look on their faces.

“He just went from a zero to a two in my eyes for not smashing you, Ben!”

“How does he get to be a ten?”

I look over to the other side of the road and watch Griggs as he walks. It’s a lazy walk but so full of confidence that you want to be standing behind him all the way.

How does Jonah Griggs get to be a ten? He sits on a train with me when we’re fourteen and he weeps, tearing at his hair, bashing his head with the palm of his hand, self-hatred pouring out of him like blood from a gut wound in a war movie, and for the first time in my whole life I have a purpose. I am the holder of the grief and pain and guilt and passion of Jonah Griggs and as we sit huddled on the floor of the carriage, he allows me to hold him, to say, “Shhh, Jonah, it wasn’t your fault.” While his body still shakes from the convulsions, he takes hold of my hand and links my fingers with his and I feel someone else’s pain for the first time that I can remember.

The knock at my window that night frightens the hell out of me. I’ve used the window for years as an exit point, but nobody has used it as an entry and for a crazy moment I convince myself that the boy in the tree in my dreams is coming after me.

I get up from my computer and peer out and there, crouching on the ledge, is Griggs. He doesn’t ask to be let in. He just stands up, expecting me to step aside. Technically this could be considered against the rules of the territory wars but I open the window. He looks down at my singlet and underpants and stares for a long time as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Then he climbs in and looks around the room without commenting.

I walk to my drawers and put on my jumper, which hardly reaches my thighs.

“Hope you didn’t do that on my account.”

I don’t say anything and he casually leans against my desk, picking up the novel that’s sitting there.

“It’s bullshit,” he tells me, flicking through it. “There’s no such thing as Atticus Finch.”

I shrug. “It’d be good if there was, though. Why are you here?”

“Why else? The Club House,” he says.

I nod. “If we agree on this, we need to explain the rules to the Townies,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “No ridiculous dress codes concocted by irrational women.”

It’s like he’s making things up off the top of his head.

“It’s our men who are irrational,” I explain to him. “We prefer to be labelled as pragmatic and long-suffering.”

“So how do they get in here?”

“Who?”

“Your irrational men. Cassidy? The rest?”

For a moment I get a sense of why he’s really here. I feel my face flushing and see that his is, too.

I clear my throat and get back to business. “Ban for life on anyone who gets drunk.”

“No boy-band music.”

I don’t know what to say to that one because I’m making all this up as well.

“No…Be

“Ke

“We insist that the Mullet Brothers don’t play every night.”

“Mullet Brothers?” After a moment he works out who I’m talking about and he nods. “We call them Heckle and Jeckle.”

“And you never step on my second-in-command’s fingers ever again.”

He nods once more. “My second-in-command? Choi? He DJs. He’ll want to do that at least once.”

I nod. Lots of nodding. It’s all too awkward. A few days ago I had brought up one of the most taboo subjects of his life and he had me pi

“If this backfires, there’ll be a war,” I say.

“There already is a war. I think you forget that at times.”

“And you don’t?”

“Never. And you can’t afford to either.”

“Is that a warning?”

“Maybe. But let’s not make it complicated. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t backfire.”

He holds out a hand and I shake it and as I do he stands up from where he’s leaning against my desk and it’s like he hovers over me, which is strange because I’ve always been at eye-level with the boys around here.

I feel his fingers on my collarbone, faintly tracing the marks where my buttons scratched my skin when he grabbed me days before.

“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” I say quietly. “I don’t know why I did.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t come here to ask or give forgiveness.”

And it’s like a trigger word, making every pulse inside of me throb. “Forgive me,” I whisper, dizzy from the sensation.

He leans forward and our foreheads are almost touching and for a moment, a tiny moment, a slight vulnerability appears on his face.

“Nothing to forgive,” he says.

I shake my head. “No. That’s what he said. ‘Forgive me.’ It’s what the Hermit whispered in my ear before he shot himself.”

“My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. I counted. It happened on the Jellicoe Road, the prettiest road I’d ever seen…”

Jude sat still, listening to a memory so sad that he wondered how Narnie could tell it so calmly, with so much clarity and detail. Over the years he’d had a fair idea of what had happened that night on the Jellicoe Road and sometimes he hated himself for wanting to be part of something so tragic. He wanted to be the hero riding by on a stolen bike. He wanted to be the one carrying their parents and Tate’s sister out of the cars. He wanted to belong to them. With them he found solace.

They sat by the river and he wanted to take Narnie’s hand but didn’t dare.

“Do you know why I couldn’t count how long it took my mother to die?”

As much as he knew that he didn’t want to hear the answer, he shook his head.

“Because she flew out that window. I could see her the whole time. From where I was sitting. And I knew she was dead straightaway because she didn’t have a head, Jude, and I stayed in that spot, not moving a single inch and everyone thought I was scared but I wasn’t. Because if I moved an inch, Webb would see her and you don’t know how much Webb loved her, Jude, and I would have died right there if I knew that Webb saw her like that. I would have…I would have….”