On the Jellicoe Road

We don’t say much as we walk back to the car but he has his hand on my shoulder and I can feel it shaking. When we’re settled inside, he clears his throat and starts up the engine.

“She thought you were the serial killer,” Griggs tells him.

“I heard. From Jessa McKenzie.”

I don’t want to talk just yet but I’m curious. “What were you doing with her?” I ask quietly.

“Apart from questioning her about your whereabouts, I was listening to the most intriguing story about my life moonlighting as a kidnapper.”

“Based on incriminating evidence,” Griggs adds. “Apparently you’re always around or away when someone disappears.”

“Yes, well, kidnapping’s my thing,” he says dryly.

“According to the newspapers, it is.”

“That wasn’t kidnapping. That was taking you to a safer place.”

“Me?” I ask.

“You.”

No information comes easily. It’s like he’s spent a lifetime censoring himself. I can understand, having known Ha

“How come?”

“You were seven. Tate rang Ha

My mother leaving me places was nothing new. That it actually meant something to her, however, surprises me.

“She was on a blinder for the next couple of days, so I stayed,” he continues. “One day when she was out, I decided to take you back to Narnie’s. Except by the time I got to Jellicoe, Tate had called the police and they had to charge me with kidnapping.”

I bring out the photograph of me when I was three and show it to him. He takes it from me, glancing down at it for a moment before he looks back to the road.

“You took this photo?” I ask.

“Narnie did. You came to live with us. It was a bad time for Tate. She made us promise not to give you back to her until she was totally clean.”

“Then why did you give me back?”

“Because she did get clean. If there was anyone who could make Tate feel anything it was you, Taylor, but then somehow she’d slip up and go downhill fast. Sometimes she’d disappear with you. We lost track of you both for a few years and then, one day, when you were eleven, she rang up Narnie, crazy mad, and said that she was to take you. She signed the papers and told us that under no condition were we to allow her ever to have you again. That she was poison. Her self-loathing was…I can’t explain. She wouldn’t even meet Narnie. She told her that you’d be at the Seven-Eleven at twelve fifteen. But she made Narnie promise one more thing. That Narnie was never to be a mother to you. You had a mother, she insisted.”

And Narnie honoured that. Keeping me at a distance for as long as I can remember.

“We still have no idea what made her react that way,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say quietly, thinking of Sam.

He looks at me carefully. “Oh, it does, believe me. Everything that’s happened to you matters.”

“But not today, sir,” Griggs says firmly.

We’re silent for a while and I want to ask one thousand questions but I don’t know how. I watch him as he drives. There’s a hollowness to his cheeks and a bit of a sadness in his eyes and although he is all muscle and no fat, he looks underweight and unhealthy.

He senses me staring and looks my way for a moment. Then he smiles and it’s so lovely that it brings tears to my eyes.

“I look like Narnie,” I say like I can read his mind.

“A bit. But you look a lot like Webb.”

When the silence gets too much, I put on Santangelo’s CD and he looks at me bemused.

“Ke

“Jessa’s a fan. I’m relating to some of the music,” I tell him.

“‘Coward of the County’?”

I glare at him and he looks uncomfortable and for a moment I see his eyes glance in the rear-view mirror at Griggs. “I meant ‘The Gambler.’”

“Liar.”

But my tone is softer. We’ve reached some kind of truce and as he starts speaking again, I begin to remember his voice. I’ve known it all my life. I realise that it is between this man and Ha

While Griggs sleeps, he tells me stories I’ve never heard. About all the films they shot on Super 8, of dancing among the trees like pagans, of Fitz’s .22 rifle and the pot shots he’d take at anything that moved, of sitting in a tree with Webb and philosophising about the meaning of life. And of their plans to build a bomb shelter in case the Russians and Americans blew each other up with nuclear weapons and the marathon scissor-paper-rock competitions and the card games that went all night.

I fall in love with these kids over and over again and my heart aches for their tragedies and marvels at their friendship. And it’s like we’ve been talking for five minutes instead of five hours.

The days they loved best were spent in the clearing, talking about where they would go from there. Jude especially enjoyed these days because it meant he had something to offer them. The city was a whole new landscape, one that Jude knew better than any of them.

Fitz was in the tree, strategically positioning the five tins. “As long as we don’t live in some wanky suburb where people drink coffee and talk shit,” he called out.

“The gun has to stay behind,” Jude said. “People in the city don’t walk around with rifles, shooting tins out of trees.”

Fitz swung off one branch to another and climbed down the trunk a third of the way before diving off and landing in a commando-style roll at their feet.

“Reckon I can be in the Cadets, Jude?” he mocked.

“You have psycho tattooed on your face, Fitz. Of course they’ll let you in.”

Fitz picked up the gun and aimed and then fired, hitting two of the unseen tins in a row.

“What happens to Narnie?” Tate asked. “If we leave in a year’s time, she’ll be here on her own for the year after.”

“You can’t stay here,” Narnie said quietly. “There’s nowhere to live and there are no jobs. You have to go to the city.”

“But we’ve got money when we turn eighteen,” Webb explained. “And we’re buying the one-acre block near the river on this side of the Jellicoe Road. The house is going to be three split levels, the one on top like an attic. It’ll have a skylight so you can see every star in the galaxy. From the front window downstairs you’ll be able to see the river and when all of us are old and grey, we’ll sit by the window and die peacefully there, smoking our pipes, talking bullshit, bringing up our kinfolk—” His accent turned American and Narnie giggled.

A bullet hit the third tin and a few seconds later another one hit the fourth.

“Hey, GI Jude, can you beat that?”

“Hey, Fucked-up Fitz, don’t want to.”

“Good call.” Tate laughed.

“When do we come back to build the house?” Jude asked.

“When we finish our degrees. We come back here and build for a year and then we scatter. But the house is always here to come back to.”

“Scatter?” Tate said. “Why? We stay here. Why go anywhere else?”

“Because we’ll never know how great this place is until we leave it,” Narnie said.

“I miss it more every time I go,” Jude said.

“And you’re not even from here,” Fitz said.

Jude stared at him. “What?” he asked angrily. “Do you have to be born here? Or do your parents have to be buried here? Or do you have to be related?”

Fitz aimed again and fired and for a moment everyone stopped, waiting for the sound of bullet on tin. But it never came. He looked at Jude and shrugged.