by S. K Munt
Unchained Melody
S.K Munt
Cover by Natalie Spasic
© S. K Munt 2014 First Rights Reserved
ISBN: 9781631732218
To the best fan an author could hope for, Jennifer Guerin,
who inspired (made) me write this for her birthday today!
And Michael Munce (Spock), for forcing me to listen to Metallica / The Black Album like nothing else mattered.
Part One
Cotton to Lace
Horizon, Australia 1991.
When the little boy in the red hat shoved the girl off the edge of the rock and into the frigid gorge, it sent up a wall of water.
‘No girls!’ was his triumphant cry as he bounded over his victim’s head and cannonballed further out into the dark depths behind her.
Callie Clay had been inching her way towards where the boys were, trying to hear what song one of them was trying to pluck on the battered Gibson he’d brought along. It might have been When I see You Smile by Bad English, which she’d done her last ballet exam to before they’d moved overseas, but the girls beside her had a little tape player that was squeaking out Pump Up The Jam and drowning the boy’s clumsy acoustics out. When those girls rose to their feet to shriek at the boy in the red hat, all the music stopped and Callie went to the aid of Marnie, who was still floundering in the shallows.
‘Hey! That’s not safe!’ One girl screeched.
‘There are rocks under there Hunter!’
‘You are such a creep!’
‘Is Marnie okay?!’
‘Hunter I’m going to kill you!’ Marnie spluttered, taking her glasses off her face to drag her arm across her eyes. She then squinted at her misted lenses, looking worried. ‘Jerk.’
‘Shut up or go home girls!’ A voice bellowed from the diving rock above. Callie looked, and saw that it was the guitarist boy in the blue swim trunks. He’d stood and the adult guitar was sagging from its strap against his gangly knees. ‘You sound like drunken lorikeets!’
‘And you sound like you could use a tune-up!’ Callie shot back, forgetting her mother’s caution to try and fit in for once. ‘There are more than two chords on a guitar you know!’ When the boy's eyes widened, Callie saw what a lovely shade of bluish green they were, a contrast exaggerated by the foliage around him.
Cute. She thought. Too bad he’s tone deaf. She turned back to Marnie who now had her hand and asked: ‘Are you okay?’ Being new in town, Callie had come to the gorge that day to try and make a good impression. If she’d just insulted one of the popular boys, she ought to at least help the only girl who seemed as intent on swimming as Callie did, instead of lounging on the rocks with the other boring girls.
‘I cut my ankle I think.’ Marnie took Callie’s hand and slithered up the side of a mossy rock. When she was standing, she braced her foot against another and examined the dribble of blood running from the rounded bone to the back of her white calf. She looked over at the boys and pouted up at the one with the guitar. ‘Maybe I should just jump- and I’ll push Ryan down first so I can land on him!’
Callie glanced up at the gorge walls, which were flanked by the boys on both sides. She’d come with her new neighbor Allanah to meet some girls and have some fun, but aside from Marnie’s face-off with Hunter, none of the girls had been into the water. None of them had really even tried.
‘You never jump?’ Callie asked Marnie, watching a heavy-set boy leap from a rather low ledge, maybe only five feet above the surface of the inkwell water. It was a weak victory, but his smile when he emerged from the flume of his own creation was a proud one. It looked like so much fun!
Callie had just moved to Australia from Canada, and it was always too cold there to actually swim in the lakes or go barefoot in the forests. Now that her hair was clinging to her neck from sweat, she wanted to have fun cooling off!
‘Are you crazy?’ Marnie squeaked. ‘It’s too dangerous! Believe me, we’re just happy to swim here, when they-’ she jerked her thumb towards the guys. ‘Aren’t around. Which is almost never. And even then, it’s too cold to stay in for more than a few minutes.’
‘Dangerous?’ Callie echoed, scrutinizing the canyon yet again. From what she could tell, the sides of the gorge were sheer, and the water deeply dark. ‘My father told me that it’s real deep!’
‘Oh it is,’ Marnie nodded, following her gaze. ‘But you have to jump out because there are little ledges and stuff near the sides. A lot of kids have gotten hurt from jumping too close.’ Then she pointed to the right side of the gorge, where the walls were higher. ‘And that side is worse. Hunter is the only one of us third-graders who’s done it from that side- that’s how he got that hat.’
Callie squinted up at the shale wall, wondering if she had it in her to make a point for the girls side. Her rapid pulse told her that the decision had been made. ‘Hat?’ She was barely listening for the blood whooshing in her ears.
‘That red hat he’s wearing. Brendan Buddy, a twelfth grader, dared him to jump from there last week. Said if he did, he’d give Hunter his new Red Sox hat which he got in America after Christmas. Hunter made the jump, and Brandon handed it over and said that when he goes to Uni, Hunter will be the new king of the gorge- which is why he’s being so bossy. He and Ryan think they own the place now.’
Callie supposed that she was supposed to be impressed but she’d grown up in North America; where RedSox hats were as common as dimes. ‘Which one is Ryan?’
‘The wannabe with the guitar. He doesn’t jump as high as Hunter, but he flips. He’s pretty cool...’
‘Ah.’ Callie thought. Silently adding: The cute one. It sounded like Marnie thought the same thing. Callie wasn’t big on noticing boys, but Ryan was very tanned, with very white teeth and very dark hair. He was definitely cute, but it was clear that he and the Hunter kid Marnie was talking about were bullies.
‘Yeah. If you think they’re jerks though you should have been here last week. When the teenagers are around, some of them actually climb that tree and go out on the branch to jump because it’s safer. Crazy, huh?’ Marnie gestured to a long branch thrusted off a Strangler Fig and over the water. The branch was at least thirty feet above the water’s surface!
Callie’s shivered like she was being tickled on the back of her neck. Before she knew it, she was on her feet, adjusting the seat of her red swimsuit. ‘You can jump from there? No one’s died or anything?’
‘Not from there, no. But it’s just a matter of time...’ Marnie’s voice sounded faraway to Callie. The combination of the waterfall pounding into the water, and her rushing blood was making it hard to focus on anything else. She side-stepped around a pretty blonde girl in pink bathers (which matched her pink tape deck) named Meredith, and floated towards the man-built steps embedded in the craggy hill. A rail fenced it off from the gorge, and the path at the top led up the mountain for a while, and then down to the car park.
But Callie wasn’t going to follow the path home; she was going to jump over the safety rail as Hunter had earlier, and cut through the trees to the highest rim of the gorge. Before she could change her mind, she began to run up the steps, humming Greensleeves to herself, a tune that was forever stuck in her head like an ice cream had stalled in there.
‘Hey Kelly if you’re going up there for a look, be careful okay?’ Marnie called out after her. ‘There are rocks and stuff under the leaves, and it can get really slippery!’
‘It’s Callie!’ Callie eased one leg over the rail. Even in the dappled light, broken branches and wet, foot-flattened leaves led the way. When she reached a sort of clearing between the trees, she looked down to Marnie and called: ‘So how far out should I jump? If I don’t want to go up the branch?’
Seven faces turned
to gape at her. Though all girls looked completely different from her, their shock rendered them identical. Open mouths and widened eyes- Callie would have giggled if she wasn’t so nervous.
‘You’re going to jump?’ an Aboriginal girl asked, pulling on one of her curly pigtails until it was stretched straight. ‘From that side?! That’s nuts!’
‘Yeah!’ Cried her new neighbor Alannah, who had brought Callie to the gorge under her mother’s orders. She had gone as white as Callie’s tan lines, and the twist of her lips told Callie that she wouldn’t be invited along a second time. ‘Only the boys jump Callie!’
A few weeks before, Callie’s skin had been alabaster from the endless Canadian winters. But two weeks in the Queensland sun had tinted her a deep olive-brown, and her mother was now slathering her with sun block every morning, clucking her tongue nervously. There was so much to fear in Australia; snakes, spiders, crocodiles; all under a sun that could literally burn your insides... and now Callie was adding something else to the list: picturesque gorges and submerged ledges, and boys who shoved!
‘I’ll be fine,’ Callie told them, trying to look more confident then she felt. She could see on their faces that they did not believe she would do it, and had already assumed that she would die if she did. She wondered if she was making a spectacle of herself when she oughtn’t- if she was already frittering away her chance at a fresh start in a new town.
Not that she’d ever been in danger of fitting in. Callie Clay was a ‘Musical Prodigy’ and that made her weird. The fact that she was adopted also made her weird. Her mother being a famous writer of romance novels made her weirder (and possibly a snob as the girls had always whispered) her extreme phobia of violent weather made her ‘Coo-coo,’ and now she had being a foreigner to add to that list as well!
But Callie didn’t mind being weird. She’d accepted is as a fact about herself back in the first grade, and had come to terms with it by the second. If she ever got herself a best friend, she hoped that friend was weird too, so at last she could be the same as someone else without having to act like someone else.
Someone she could confess to about the weirdest thing about her: Callie Clay had never, ever had a dream. Or a nightmare. She’d been taken to therapists and doctors but no one could tell what was wrong with her. In fact, tests showed that she was smarter than most kids her age, so she wasn’t mentally defective or anything- just plain weird.
And that was why she was going to jump; not to show off, but because if Callie could dream of anything, it would be flying. And jumping off that ledge might feel very close to flying, even closer then when she did her split-leaps. Remembering her overprotective mother’s plea had made Callie pause, yet her second leg swung over the fence a moment later.
‘Hey! That chick says she’s going to jump!’
‘No way!’
‘Yes way, that’s what she said!’
Callie ignored them and ducked under a thick root, remembering Marnie’s caution, glancing down for anything that might trip her up. But she was sure-footed, and made her way up the track quickly, humming Greensleeves more loudly to herself to drown out the outraged cries coming from the base of the gorge- boys saying she wouldn’t, and girls saying she shouldn’t.
It was cool among the trees, degrees chillier than it had been down on the rocks but the air was soupy and full of buzzing insects in chorus. Callie could actually feel her sweat- both from the humidity, exertion and nerves- prickle out of the pores along her shoulder blades, when the ground flattened out just enough to create a platform of sorts on the edge of the gorge. She tiptoed as close to the edge as possible, looked down, and was almost instantly overcome by vertigo. It was higher than she’d thought! So high that leaning forward, only an inch, made gravity grasp at her shoulders and draw her down. She hugged the trunk of the tree with the crook of her inner elbow, securing herself and peered over again, immediately spying the hazard; thin shelves jutted out from the base of the cliff just under the water, waiting to break ankles if not necks.
Callie clapped her teeth together thoughtfully. She would have to leap out into nothingness to clear those rocks. Maybe sixteen year old legs could launch their bodies that far with ease, but Callie felt like she needed a run-up to do the same. Yet there was nowhere to run from as only two feet separated the nothingness above the gorge from the wall of trees behind her.
Callie looked up then, seeing the branch Marnie had mentioned and frowned. It did not look safe- it was barely wider than her leg and though it stretched out almost to the centre of the narrow gorge, she knew she would never trust her slight weight to its strength, so leaping off the side was her only option.
‘What do you think you’re doing?!’
Callie flinched, tightened her hold on the branch and turned to give the boy who’d startled her a nasty look. ‘Sneak!’ She snapped. ‘I almost went off accidentally then!’
‘I didn’t sneak; I stomped.’ Up-close, the boy had very nice brown eyes that were rimmed with a bright flash of yellow on the inside, and black on the outside- and a very not-nice sneer under a smattering of freckles the same color as his dirty-blonde hair. ‘You’re just chicken!’
‘Shows what you know!’ Callie turned back to the water, hating his smug face and his red hat. ‘I was just deciding if I should go off the ledge or the branch.’
The boy snorted. ‘Yeah right. You’re lying. And why do you talk funny?’
‘It’s called an accent, dumb-dumb.’ Callie took a step towards the edge and the water seemed to rush up at her, but a hand pulled her back.
‘You can’t do that, okay? I’m the only one here who can do that. You’ll crack your head open and then our parents won’t let us swim here any more because some weird girl did something stupid!’
Callie glanced up to see that she had the rapt attention of everyone present, and they were silent as they waited to see what she would do. She smiled back at Hunter. ‘You mean, you’re afraid I’ll go from the branch and show you up in front of your friends?’
Hunter gave her a disgusted look. ‘Oh yeah? Well you better stop moving like an old lady then- because I’m going to do it first! And I’ll do it from much higher than some dumb girl can!’ He tugged down the brim of his cap and pushed past her, scaling the trunk of the tree, loudly singing: ‘Here we are now! Entertain us!’
Callie was instantly overcome with alarm. ‘Wait!’ Her teeth snapped on the word. ‘You can’t do that! I was joking okay? I’d never go off that branch and you shouldn’t either! It’s too skinny!’
‘It’s had bigger kids on it all year.’ But Hunter’s words were barely audible over his huffing breath and the shouts of encouragement from his friends below. All but one, for one boy sounded angry. Callie looked over and saw that Ryan the guitar guy had handed his instrument to the big-eared kid and walked all the way to the ledge on his side yelling: ‘Hunter! Get back on the ground you numb-skull! The whole tree is shaking!’
Callie looked up and saw that Ryan was right; as Hunter’s weight shifted from the trunk to the branch, the entire thing dipped, sending a scattering of leaves down to the water beneath him.
‘I’m not planning on staying on the branch for long!’ Hunter’s tone might have sounded jovial to the boys in his camp, but Callie was close enough to hear the edge in his voice as he shifted only a fraction and the entire, greenish grey branch bowed dramatically. He reached up, took the smaller branch above him in his hands and ever so slowly, began to stand up, his feet curled around the branch, his back hunched to keep his face out of its leaves. ‘This is our place!’ He declared, punching at the sky with one crooked arm and a balled fist. ‘Girls don’t belong here, do they boys?’
‘Nope!’
‘No way!’
‘Hunter stop being an idiot!’ Marnie’s shriek sounded tearful.
‘Yeah man come on, enough foolin!’ Ryan yelled. Callie looked at him, and he returned her fearful gaze adding: ‘You don’t need to prove anything to the new girl!
’
‘Who cares about the new girl? I’m jumping ‘cos I’m a rock star!’ Hunter hooted to the sky. ‘With the lights out! It’s-’ but a crack, as sharp as lightning and yet as brittle as tearing paper resounded and then, the branch beneath Hunter’s feet bent sharply in the middle. Callie gasped and Hunter let out a bellow as the lime green innards beneath the bark peeled out under one of his feet like fluorescent spikes. She screamed, as did many others, and when Hunter’s hands were tugged free from the hold on the branch above him, she screamed again. He began to fall and then, he was only sinking, as though time had slowed.
‘Ahh!’ Hunter cried, as the part of the broken branch he’d caught himself on at the last minute- the wrong end, cracked again and dropped him lower, jerking him violently until he was hanging level but too far for her to reach him and his weight was slowly peeling back the dead bark to reveal more green sapling beneath. When they gave, Hunter was going to plummet towards the cliff, not away from it!
Panic gripped Callie, and everybody else was shouting, sounding as Ryan had said: exactly like drunken lorikeets, the brightly colored native birds that filled the summer twilights with their screams. She let go of the tree and stepped to the side so that their bodies were in line, an idea formulating. An idea she hated- but she had baited the boy into doing this by trying to show-off and if he got hurt, it would be her fault. Her fault for being weird. She tried thinking about her father’s beloved collections of comic books and all of those men dressed funny who did things like this, and fretted to think that she didn’t have a thing in common with any of them, least of all strength. A cape might have helped too.
‘Hunter!’ She spoke his name as loudly and clearly as she was able. ‘Look at me!’
‘I can’t!’ Hunter half-choked out the response, but his furtive gaze skimmed hers before returning to the water. ‘I’m going to fall!’
‘I know!’ Callie wiped her sweaty hands on the side of her dry bathing suit, curling her posture, feeling what little muscle she had retract and tighten. ‘But I can make you fall straight if you listen to me!’ In her mind she had her pointe shoes on and her leotard and instead of extending and leaping to cross a timber floor, she was going to cross the gorge. She had the best jumps in every ballet class she’d ever attended, she reminded herself, she could do this! ‘You’re going to fall, and the moment you feel me, you’re going to let go of that branch, all right?’ She swallowed. ‘Straight away! If you don’t, you’ll kill us both.’
