On the Jellicoe Road

“Do you remember the last time you saw me?” he asks.

I don’t answer and he continues. “Eve had left us at home with Les, that arsehole she was going out with.”

I shudder and I sense Griggs looking at me.

“The cops got him, you know. Part of the kid porn thing a couple of months ago. Remember your mum came after her shift and went berserk and she was belting Les with everything she could find and she was screaming, ‘What the fuck have you done to them?’”

I shake my head. But I do remember now and I know it’s the story I told Raffy that she’ll never forget. The one she wouldn’t let me remember.

“And we were just standing there in our knickers crying because we didn’t get why she was going apeshit and she grabbed you and dragged you out of there and Eve was shouting at her and calling her a crazy bitch and the neighbours went nuts.”

“Whose mother was the bigger fruitcake? Yours or mine?”

Next to me I sense the change in Griggs’s breathing.

“And I never saw you again. Two days later she came back without you. She was so off her face. Eve asked, ‘Where’s the kid?’ and your mum said, ‘She’s in heaven,’ and she just killed herself laughing for ages. Fuck, I cried for a week, you know.”

I’m staring at him with my mouth open. “Why would my mother say something like that?”

Sam doesn’t respond to questions and doesn’t wait for answers. He just speaks and I can’t even block him out because it takes too much effort.

“You had a Spiderman outfit,” he continues.

“Saving the neighbourhood from evil,” I say weakly, remembering my line.

He stands up. “Got to be somewhere,” he says. “You said you had money.”

I look at Griggs, pleadingly, but Griggs is staring at me like he’s been hit by a truck.

I glance back at Sam and there’s a look on his face. Like he hates me. “You’re angry with me,” I say as he begins to walk away.

“Let him go,” Griggs says quietly.

But I can’t. I jump out of the booth and go after him. “I didn’t ask her to take me out to a Seven-Eleven six hundred kilometres from here and leave me there, Sam. At least your mother didn’t do that to you,” I say angrily. Griggs tries to pull me away.

“Mine went to Canberra for two weeks,” Sam says, looking at me with massive cold eyes. “But she didn’t leave me there. She left me with Les.”

I stare at him. Griggs is standing next to me, rubbing his eyes, like he’d love to just disappear. After a couple of minutes I take some of Santangelo’s money from Griggs and stuff it into Sam’s hand. Our fingers touch for a moment.

“You didn’t even know who I was,” he says. “I knew you straightaway.” And that little hurt boy is back and I let myself remember things that I’ve been blocking for years.

“What do you want me to remember, Sam? That I taught you to read? And we read the first Harry Potter book and when I finished you said…you said…” I can hardly speak because I’m crying again.

“I said, ‘I wish I was a wizard,’” he whispers.

We stare at each other for a moment and he pockets the money.

“Do you know where Oxford Street is?” he asks after a moment.

I look at Griggs and he nods.

“Meet me there tonight at about ten thirty. At the lights outside the Court House Hotel.”

I nod again.

“I’ll find out what I can from Eve.”

Griggs and I walk in total silence. We’re in a laneway where rubbish is strewn and bins are overflowing. Suddenly he kicks one of the bins with full force and it goes flying. I stand and watch him. His back is to me. I walk up and put my arms around him, leaning against him.

I feel his heart thumping hard and his hands take mine and they are shaking.

“You okay now?” I ask him after a while.

He doesn’t say anything, but just turns around and holds me.

“Jonah, regardless of what happened, I’ve spent the last six years living in…”

I think for a moment and a little touch of hope makes itself felt.

“What?” he asks.

“I was going to say, ‘I’ve spent the last six years living in paradise.’ Do you get it? It’s like heaven. That’s what she meant.”

“Except the kid thought you were dead.”

“She took me out there and rang up Ha

“And when she came back, the kid said she was absolutely off her face because you were gone from her life,” he said.

I’m looking at him in wonder. “I never thought she loved me, you know.”

It’s a quarter to eleven before Sam shows. He has that edgy look about him, unable to keep still, his eyes like a crazed rabbit about to be caught.

“She’s in a hos—hospice? Up the road. St. Vincent’s.”

“Hospital,” I correct.

“Whatever.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

He shrugs. He looks around, edging away, but I catch a glimpse of some need in his eyes. Like he hasn’t given up completely.

Griggs takes my hand and pulls me away, but I don’t want to let go.

“Sam!” I call out and he turns around. “I live on the Jellicoe Road. Where trees make canopies overhead and where you can sit at the top of them and see forever. My aunt built me a house there. Remember that.”

He’s staring at me but it’s better than him walking away.

“Promise me you’ll remember,” I say forcefully.

He nods and we walk away but like Lot’s wife I turn back. He’s talking to this middle-aged guy who has his hand on his shoulder. The next minute they both get into a taxi and then they’re gone.

“Let’s go,” Griggs says quietly.

At the hostel we get our own room. It’s tiny with double bunks but we climb into the same bed and Griggs holds on to me like he’s never going to let go.

“Do you want to know why I called my school that time?” he asks in the dark.

“You don’t have to explain.”

“No, I want to. I had this dream. That someone—actually it was my father—spoke to me and he said, ‘Jonah, if you go any farther, you will never come back,’ and although I’ve been told a million times during counselling that I don’t need his forgiveness, I just thought it was the closest thing to it. That maybe he was protecting me from something out there and that the warning was his way of saying that he forgave me. Then I thought, if I’m not coming back, then you probably won’t be either so I called the school and next thing the Brigadier and Santangelo’s dad turn up.”

He sounds so sad that it breaks my heart.

“But now that we’re out here, as bad as everything seems, I don’t think my life or yours was at risk. So I must have imagined it all. There was no message. There was no forgiveness. Nothing.”

“You don’t know that. We were younger then, Jonah. Maybe something would have happened to us if we had reached the city. And, as Jessa would say, there is always that serial killer. Maybe your dad was warning you because he cared.”

He shakes his head and, although it’s dark, I can tell he’s crying.

“What are you thinking?” I whisper after a while.

“That you deserve romance,” he says.

I trace his face with my fingers. “Let me see. A guy tells me that he would have thrown himself in front of a train if it wasn’t for me and then drives seven hours straight, without whingeing once, on a wild-goose chase in search of my mother with absolutely no clue where to start. He is, in all probability, going to get court-martialled because of me, has put up with my moodiness all day long, and knows exactly what to order me for breakfast. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that, Jonah.”

“I’m in year eleven, Taylor. I’m not going to get court-martialled.”

“Just say you get expelled?”

“Then so be it. I still would have driven for seven hours and ordered you hot chocolate and white toast and marmalade.”

“And you don’t call that romantic? God, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

I sit up in the dark and after a moment I take off my singlet and I hear him taking off his T-shirt and we sit there, holding each other, kissing until our mouths are aching, and then we’re pulling off the rest of our clothes and I’m under him and I feel as if I’m imprinted onto his body. Everything hurts, every single thing including the weight of him and I’m crying because it hurts and he’s telling me he’s sorry over and over again, and I figure that somewhere down the track we’ll work out the right way of doing this but I don’t want to let go, because tonight I’m not looking for anything more than being part of him. Because being part of him isn’t just anything. It’s kind of everything.