by Debra Oswald
‘Hey, Matt,’ said Jycinta, ‘we should go back to your place after this. Or we could go for a drive to Glen.’
Matt didn’t look too crazy about that idea. ‘Oh, I’m low on petrol and kind of broke at the moment.’
‘No problem. I’ve got petrol money,’ Jycinta declared, patting her red plastic handbag.
‘Well … y’know … I’ve got to be up early for work tomorrow,’ mumbled Matt.
Jycinta opened her mouth to argue (she wasn’t going to give up easily) when Marissa came hurtling past the back doors on Riley’s skateboard, squealing with a mixture of thrills and terror. She panicked and jumped off the board. The board went flying in one direction, while Marissa staggered in the other, crashing into Matt and cackling with laughter.
‘Hello! Have you gone mental?’ screeched Jycinta. She turned to Matt and rolled her eyes about what a loser Marissa was. ‘Sorry, Matt.’
Matt wasn’t fussed. He just strolled over, flipped up Riley’s skateboard and handed it to him.
Jycinta glared at Marissa. ‘So embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m being seen with you. Oh my God.’
‘But Jycinta, I was just –’
Jycinta moaned with disappointment as she saw Matt leave the pizzeria with the group of older guys. She spun back to snap at Marissa.
‘Thanks for stuffing things up for me and Matt. First you do that stupid skateboard act which, y’know, makes me look stupid – as your friend. And then you stood there cackling like a retarded chicken.’
Jycinta stalked off. Marissa scurried after her. ‘Jycinta, wait!’
I was thinking I might head home when JT burst into the courtyard, squawking and flapping his arms.
‘Photo! Photo time! Come inside quick! Everyone!’
In the main room of the pizzeria, JT was herding everyone into a big group pose up against the mural of grapes and olives and other Italian stuff.
‘We’ve gotta get a photo!’ roared JT. ‘This is a historic occasion!’
We all shuffled around, making sure short kids weren’t blocked from view. Corey came back into the pizzeria from the street. He ended up next to me in the back row, leaning against a bunch of painted grapes. Lauren was out the front helping JT work the delay mechanism on the camera.
‘Any luck with – uh –?’ I asked Corey, flicking my head discreetly in Lauren’s direction.
‘Well, we went for a walk down the street by ourselves and I went for the kiss.’
‘Yeah? Bold move. How’d you go?’
‘Nuh.’ He shook his head. ‘She kind of moved her head sideways so it didn’t connect. Someone must’ve told her I’m a repulsive dog. She goes, “Let’s be friends.”’
‘Oh mate …’ That was no good. ‘Friends’ was not what you wanted to hear.
‘Oh well, there’s always hope,’ he grinned. ‘Friends is a start. The impossible can happen.’
He was on such a high about the skatepark campaign that nothing could make a dent in his good mood. He was feeling hopeful about everything, even about his chances with Lauren Saxelby.
Mum organised all the littlest kids in the front row for the photo and then put herself up the back near us. ‘Corey, you coming to stay at our place after?’ she asked.
‘Thanks a lot but I might head home. Cheer Mum up with the good news.’
Mum smiled. ‘She’ll be pleased, yeah.’
‘Surprised, more like,’ said Corey. ‘She said it’d never happen. We couldn’t do it. But we did, eh?’
Corey sucked in a huge lungful of air and tipped his head back. ‘Ha! I can’t believe how good this feels. Like, we did it and it worked.’ He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘I don’t wanna ever forget feeling this good, you know?’
You can see how happy Corey was that night if you look at the group photo JT finally managed to take.
‘Okay, everyone,’ JT announced, ‘I’ve solved my technical difficulties. Let’s take the photo quick, before I stuff it up. Everyone bunch up. Ugly people in the dark areas. Big happy we-got-the-skatepark smile!’
I’m squinting my eyes up in that photo, the way I always do with camera flashes. My sister Amy is laughing her head off because of something JT must’ve said. Mum looks exhausted but happy. For some reason, Travis is pulling a mean tough-guy face. JT’s goofy grin appears in the bottom corner of the shot, where he squatted down during the three seconds’ shutter delay. Lauren has a kind of stiff smile but she looks pretty good otherwise. And there’s Corey in the back row with the biggest smile of anyone in the photo.
Everything felt good at that moment. Really, heaps of things were complicated but at that moment it didn’t matter. I wish I’d paid more attention, tried harder to burn it into my memory. Maybe if I’d known what was going to happen, I would have concentrated more on the good feeling.
Chapter Twelve
Monday morning, staring out the window of the maths classroom, I noticed Constable Alexakis come through the school gate. She was walking in a strange heavy way and even from a distance, you could see her face was grim.
Soon after that, at recess, people’s mobiles started ringing and it didn’t take long for the rumours to whoosh around Narragindi High. First off, there were rumours about a shooting. But no one knew who’d been shot or what had happened. No one knew if the stories were for real.
I was heading down the main corridor, thinking I’d probably find Corey in the art room, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Mrs Cahill, the lady from the office.
‘Zac, can you come down to Mr White’s office?’ she asked.
Straightaway I knew it had something to do with Corey. Well, I didn’t exactly know in a logical way but my skin prickled, as if my body knew before my mind did.
Through the half-open door of the principal’s office, I could see Mr White and Constable Alexakis talking in low voices. The office lady nodded for me to go straight in.
I was glad Alexakis was there. She looked me in the eyes and spoke gently but clearly. The principal, Mr White, was a waste of space. He couldn’t even look me in the eyes. He kept shaking his head and making this little moaning noise in his throat. I reckon the Teflon Man just wished the whole mess would slide away so he wouldn’t have to deal with any problems.
Everyone knew I was Corey’s best friend so they thought I should hear the news in private, before the rumours got out of hand. At this point in the story, I’m just going to give the facts of what happened. It might sound cold – laying out the facts like it was something that happened to strangers or on TV – but I’m trying to tell the story as clearly and straight as I can.
Alexakis explained that the police had found Warren Beggs, Corey’s stepdad, lying dead in the front doorway of the Matthews’ house. To begin with, they thought it might have been drug related, since Warren Beggs was involved in dealing. But then inside the house, in the hallway, they found Corey’s mum. She’d been shot. When the cops went into the kitchen, they found Corey on the floor. He’d been shot too.
Later, when the investigators had done their stuff, they figured that Warren had killed Corey first, then Trisha, then shot himself. Alexakis reckoned that the evidence pointed to the fact that Corey was stopping Warren from hitting his mum. No one will ever know for sure but in my opinion, that sounds right.
A whooshing sound started up in my head. Alexakis and White were saying things to me but sounding far away and peculiar, like voices on a tinny speaker phone.
There was going to be an assembly in the hall to tell the whole school the news but I didn’t have to go. I was allowed to wait in the sick bay until my mother came to pick me up. That suited me. I wanted to be by myself.
As we were shuffling out the door of the principal’s office, Constable Alexakis put her arm around me. That’s when I lost it. It’s always when someone does something nice that you start blubbing. As soon as I felt her arm around my shoulders, warm and strong, my legs went shaky under me. My eyes burned for a few seconds and then the tears oozed up.
; I bawled my eyes out, alone in the sick bay. I’m not sure how long I was in there. Mrs Cahill kept the door open between the sick bay and the reception desk. I guess she was supposed to keep an eye on me. In the corridor, I could see teachers moving in and out of the staffroom. You could tell most of them were shocked and some were truly upset. Not Mrs O’Byrne: she was blathering on about it being a ‘terrible shame but hardly a surprise’ and about the Matthews family being ‘always headed for this kind of trouble’.
Miss Kadri was sobbing and shaking. Mr Stepanovic was helping her into the staffroom but you could see he was gutted himself. Of all the teachers at Narragindi High, Mr Stepanovic was the only one who understood what a top guy Corey was. He looked through the sick-bay door at me but I kept my head down. If I’d looked at Mr Stepanovic right then, I would have lost it big-time.
I caught a glimpse of Lauren being taken through to Mr White’s office. I guess someone decided she should be told in private too. Her parents scooped her away and I didn’t see her again that day.
Mum was at the chemist’s shop when she first heard the rumours about a fifteen-year-old boy getting killed. Her first response was panic that something terrible had happened to me. When the school rang and told her it was Corey, Mum’s instant reaction was relief – that her own kid was okay. Even now, Mum feels guilty about feeling that. But I guess it’s a natural reaction. It’s not as if she didn’t feel torn up about Corey one second later.
On the way to the school, Mum reckons her heart was pounding so hard, she could hardly drive. She rushed into the sick bay and hugged me tightly. She hung on for ages as if she was afraid I’d disintegrate if she let me go.
‘Let’s find Amy and go home,’ she said finally.
I waited in the quadrangle while Mum went over to the hall to pull Amy out of the special assembly. It must have been weird for Mum to be back at Narra High that day, back where she’d been in classes with Trisha Matthews when they were both kids like us.
The rest of that day and night was a weird blur. I didn’t want to talk about Corey to anyone and stayed in my room. Mum wasn’t happy about that but she went along with it. Lying on my bed, I heard her softly open my door and check on me every few minutes.
It’s strange the way your mind switches around and loops back. There were long stretches of time when it all felt unreal, like something on a TV show, and I expected to hear Corey’s skateboard scraping on the concrete of our driveway any second. Then suddenly a wave of sick feeling would sweep through my belly and I knew it was real. Corey was dead.
From my room, I heard Amy crying, gulping for breath, with Mum hugging her and talking, talking, talking. I heard our phone ringing every ten minutes until late into the night. By the time my auntie rang, I could hear Mum was frazzled.
‘That Trisha. I hate her guts right now,’ Mum said, her voice hard and thick with anger. ‘If Trisha was here right now, I’d shake her, I’d shout. Why couldn’t she be a better mother to that boy?’
Once Amy had gone to sleep, I heard Mum sobbing in her room. The walls in our house are pretty thin. She sounded so incredibly sad, like a little kid. I should have gone in there and given her a hug but the truth is, I didn’t.
I didn’t go to school for the rest of that week but other people have told me how it was. The day after Corey died, a squad of counsellors turned up at the school. Even people who weren’t Corey’s friends were bawling in class and seeing the counsellors. I guess some of those kids were trying to get attention.
I heard that Brett Mead was making a big deal about how cut up he was. This was a guy who’d badmouthed Corey every chance he got and now he was sucking up all the look-at-me attention he could get. People like Brett Mead make me sick but you can’t let yourself worry about them too much.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it was good if people talked to the counsellors. And I think lots of people were upset for real – even if they weren’t Corey’s friends. Just to think that could happen to a kid, a kid we all knew. Something like that, it blows the universe apart, especially for younger kids. The bad guy had won.
People from the school rang our place and tried to get me to see the counsellors. I couldn’t see the point. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about Corey, let alone some stranger. I’m not saying that was the right decision. Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d talked to the counsellors – or someone – but the fact is, I didn’t.
Missing so many days of school meant that I had to get a doctor’s certificate to say I was too upset to handle classes. So on the Friday morning, Mum drove me down to the medical centre.
The doctor’s waiting room was pretty full and the second we walked in, you could feel the shift in the air. People smiled hello to Mum, then glued their eyes back to whatever junk magazines they were pretending to read. But then they started sneaking looks at me and murmuring to each other.
‘Zac Marlowe, he was a good friend of the Matthews boy.’
‘Oh, is that right?’
We waited for a fair while and eventually, the gossip-hyenas of Narragindi couldn’t control themselves. They went in for some full-on gossip even though I was sitting in the same room.
‘Apparently she was going to leave Beggs. That’s what started it,’ said one old guy.
‘No, no, no, the Matthews woman was in the drug business up to her neck,’ answered the sour-faced witch sitting opposite.
‘The boy – Corey – he was definitely involved in the drug dealing,’ added a woman rocking a pram.
They went on like that for ages, until finally Mum glared at them. Her dirty look made those people shut their gobs but you knew they were still thinking that stuff. I could practically hear the nasty thoughts grinding through their brains in that waiting room. And I knew that all over town people were getting into the gossip big-time, stickybeaking and tut-tutting in their smug voices.
A week and one day after the murders, the funeral for Corey and his mother went on in St David’s Uniting Church. (I don’t know where or when they did Warren Beggs’s funeral but it wasn’t in Narra.)
When I walked up to the church, some of our mates were already there. The guys, like JT and Travis, looked uncomfortable and stiff in the dressed-up-for-a-funeral clothes they’d found or borrowed from somewhere. Girls were hugging each other and crying. I nodded hello to a few people then quickly slinked inside the church so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.
Mr Stepanovic was already sitting there and so was Constable Alexakis. A lot of the ‘respectable’ people in Narragindi didn’t show up; didn’t want to be associated with the Matthewses and what happened. Mind you, a fair number of the stickybeaks showed up. Going to funerals is a hobby for some people in Narra.
It felt like the funeral had nothing to do with Corey. A few people (including my mum) offered to help with the ceremony, collect photos of Corey, organise music he liked, whatever. But it turned out there was no way. Some great-auntie from Adelaide was the only relative who gave a toss and even she wanted the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible. Corey’s friends were told to keep out of it. So there were no photos of Corey or his mother and none of his friends did speeches or anything.
It was mostly the minister blabbing on about God. ‘Oh Lord, we beseech thee blah blah.’ That guy hardly even mentioned Corey. He used the funeral as an excuse to bombard us with a lecture about God having a plan for us even if we didn’t always understand it. Yeah? Well, if what happened was God’s plan for Corey, it was a crap plan.
Afterwards, the coffins were loaded into hearses and driven away. We weren’t told where. The way the relatives organised the funeral seemed like they were putting out the garbage. Embarrassing garbage.
I wanted to escape the minute it was over but Mum got talking to people out the front of the church. I wandered away from the cluster of people, into the side garden.
Lauren came out of the church. She was wearing a dark purple top – Corey’s favourite colour. I wondered if Lauren knew
that or if it was just a coincidence.
A voice called out, ‘Lauren!’
Ray Stone hadn’t been at the funeral but he’d come sniffing round for a stickybeak afterwards. Stone marched straight over to Lauren and held out his hands.
‘This must be very upsetting for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Lauren let him hold her hands and she crumpled into tears again. ‘Thanks, Uncle Ray.’
‘You shouldn’t have to deal with something as sordid as this,’ he went on. ‘You’ve got a soft heart, Lauren, but that’s … well, I tried to warn you about getting involved.’
Lauren frowned, confused, as if it took her a minute to process what her uncle was actually saying. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Look, it’s a sad business. But the truth is, that boy was always likely to end up –’
Lauren pulled her hands free and took a step back from Stone. ‘Shut up. I don’t want to hear one more word out of your mouth. Shut up.’
She glared at him so fiercely that Ray Stone backed away. ‘You’re upset now, Lauren. We’ll talk later.’
Lauren swung around, as if she couldn’t bear to look at her uncle for one more second. That’s when she saw me and for one moment, we stared at each other. I could see how wretched she was. But there was nothing I could say. I was no use to Lauren, no use to anyone that day.
Once the funeral was over, I went straight home and started packing. I didn’t want to stay one more hour in Narragindi.
Mum argued with me the whole time I was shoving clothes into my backpack. I was aiming to catch the 4.45 bus to Glenthorpe. I could stay with my cousin in Glen to begin with and then work out what to do later. My heart was thumping in my chest. I was determined to do this before I chickened out.
‘Zac. Don’t do this,’ pleaded Mum. ‘Don’t walk out on school. This isn’t the day to decide anything.’
‘Have you seen the vultures in this town all round the carcass?’ I said. ‘It’s bad enough people never did anything to help Corey when he was alive but now he’s dead, they pour mud all over him and tear down who he really was.’
