‘Jonno!’ The voice is louder now. ‘C’mon, mate, where are you?’
Jonty turns and there is Tom crashing down through the trees towards him. Tom skids to a halt when he sees him up on the rock.
‘What the fuck!’
Jonty slides down the wet rock landing hard on his left leg. He stands in front of Tom in the semi-darkness, the rain pissing down between them. Tom is wearing his coat. Jonty thinks of the necklace nestled in the inside pocket for three years. Did he really forget? Maybe. Maybe it was more like he didn’t want to remember. It was a little secret he had with himself. What he does remember now is the way he nearly threw it into the river along with the scarf, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself because . . . it used to look so nice around her neck.
When Jonty moves, a blast of pain shoots up his leg from his ankle. His leg gives and he collapses onto the ground.
‘Jonno?’ Tom crouches down beside him.
‘I’ve fucked my ankle.’
He remembers being out here in Year Ten. When the bus came, he and Tom had been amongst the pack of kids who hid. The teachers had gone berserk. But when he opens his mouth to ask Tom if he remembers . . . nothing happens. He can’t get the words out.
After a while, Jonty lets Tom haul him up and help him over to some shelter under trees.
‘We’ll stay here,’ Tom tells him, ‘until the rain passes.’
‘I don’t want him to save me,’ Jonty says eventually.
Tom nods steadily, as though he knows what Jonty means.
‘You gonna piss off this time, Tom?’
‘No.’ Tom puts his arms around Jonty’s shaking shoulders. ‘I’m here, Jonno. I won’t piss off this time’
alice
Gripping the necklace tightly, Alice runs back to the car and jumps in. She stares straight ahead though the windscreen. In the distance, she hears a roll of thunder and thinks, my mother is up there. Suddenly the sky cracks open with a sharp flash of lightning, right in front of her. Clutching the necklace tight, she closes her eyes.
Alice sits alone in the front cabin for over two hours watching the rain and waiting for them to come back. She doesn’t have the keys or she would drive off without them. That’s what she tells herself, anyway, because the longer she sits there the more she hates them both. Tom went after Jonty to bring him back. So what the hell is he doing? Could they have decided to run away together? Jonty’s cover is blown so Tom might have switched sides. They’re out there, right now, rekindling their old friendship and planning their escape or . . . they could be planning to come back and kill me! Oddly enough, this last thought doesn’t frighten her in the least. Let them try!
She rummages around for something to protect herself with and comes across a rusty old pocketknife. She spends a bit of time cleaning up the biggest blade, clips it shut and then slips it into her belt. Let them try.
The rain eventually soothes her anger. It pounds down on the roof of the car, splattering on the bonnet like tiny angry insects. She sits watching it, cold but at least dry in the cabin, with her mother’s necklace held tightly in her fist. Holding it like a sort of talisman. She tries to imagine travelling back into town with her mother’s murderer sitting beside her. How bizarre will that be? Any minute now they will show up and . . .
But she can’t focus. She can’t keep her mind on anything at all. The meaning stays hidden, like a slippery fish under the surface of the water, impossible to catch.
Just as soon as she grasps one idea it disappears and something else comes galloping in to fill the space. It is like a disjointed poem made up of beautiful images that no one understands. She remembers this feeling. When she found her mother’s body that day three years before, it was exactly like this. Reality seems to be slip-sliding along the surface of her mind, like children skidding up and down a polished floor in their socks.
So they were right all along, Jonty . . . But she doesn’t even think about that very much. A cushioning blanket of dreaminess covers everything.
Every so often, she opens her hand and examines the necklace again, touching the three long hairs tangled in the chain in wonder. My mother’s hair! She will keep it forever. How heavy the chain is and how delicate. How brightly the stones shine. It is a beautiful thing and she is glad to have it. It used to look so pretty around her mother’s neck. Alice pulls the rear vision mirror around and holds it up against her own throat and pouts her mouth, turning this way and that. Yes, it suits her, too. She is like her mother in so many ways. She wonders, yet again, where the necklace came from.
‘But who?’ Alice demanded. Her mother had just told her that it was a gift from an admirer. But as much as Alice would like to believe this, she doesn’t know of any admirers. Lillian didn’t go out with men. There were only those two boys, and Alice knew it was too expensive a gift for either of them.
‘Never you mind!’ Her mother had gone coy and secretive.
‘It will be yours one day.’
And so it is, Alice thinks, gripping the necklace and looking out at the blackness and driving night rain. So it is. My mother was right. It will be mine from this day on.
She hears the boys before she sees them. The doors are yanked open. Tom gets into the drivers side and Jonty gets in the other. Both of them are soaked through and neither of them speak. She doesn’t look either right or left. Not so much as a glance at either of them. She will never look at either of them again, never willingly anyway. No one speaks for the whole way home.
Tom pulls up outside Jonty’s little house and opens his door.
‘You need a hand to get to the door?’
‘I’m right. It’s just a sprain.’
‘Bye then, Jonno,’ Tom mutters. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks. See you.’ Jonty gets out quickly without looking at Tom or Alice.
They watch him limping his way through the rain towards the gate. He turns briefly before heading to the front door. Tom nods but doesn’t take his hands from the steering wheel. They watch him go inside.
‘You want to come with me, Alice?’
She turns and sees that Tom is still staring after Jonty, his face drawn in the harsh light of the street, drained of all expression.
‘Where?’ she whispers.
‘I’m going to ring Lloyd right now,’ he says, ‘and tell him we’ll be there tomorrow.’
Lloyd? Alice has forgotten who this is and is angry suddenly. Why is he going off to ring other people when this has happened? Where will he be? What is she meant to do with the necklace? Does she have to go by herself to the police?’
‘Lloyd Hooper, the detective in charge of the case,’ Tom sighs. His knuckles are like sharp stones, gripping the steering wheel.
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll take you home now.’ He slumps forward and starts to cry.
Alice watches in numb horror as the tears build into terrible racking sobs that go right through his body. Part of her wants to reach out and touch him. His bony back and shoulders, the thin hands covering his face, seem so defenceless suddenly, and oddly young. He could be a boy of fourteen of fifteen instead of a young man in his early twenties. But she can’t reach out. She can hardly move. They are sitting only inches apart in this same cabin where only hours before they’d been so close. But something huge has moved into the space between them blocking them from each other.
‘Does he know you’re going to do that?’ she asks coldly.
‘Yeah,’ Tom groans, searching his pockets for a hanky. He finds one and blows his nose, still gasping.
‘I’ll go home then,’ she says.
‘Okay.’ Tom shakes his head and starts up the engine.
By the time Alice gets back to her grandmother’s house it is nearly midnight and still raining. Tom wants to drive into the grounds and drop her at the door, but Alice insists that being left at the side gate in the street will be fine.
‘I’d prefer to see you in,’ he says formally.
‘This is fine.’
‘You don’t look too good, Alice.’
‘I’m okay.’ She reaches for the handle as he brakes the car and hesitates without turning to face him. What can she say that will make things clear? Is she meant to do this in a formal way?
‘Thanks, Tom,’ she mutters and pushes the door open.
‘Speak soon?’ he asks, staring miserably ahead.
‘I don’t think so,’ Alice gets out of the car. ‘Goodbye, Tom.’
She walks off towards the little side gate and doesn’t turn back, not even for one last look or one last wave. Whatever she and Tom Mullaney had, or thought they had, whatever they hoped for, is gone. Over. That much is clear. She probably won’t ever talk to him again.
Walking up the paved path towards the lighted front door, Alice feels the big overhanging trees crowding in on her. Two of the lamps leading up to the house are out, so the darkness between the trees seems ominous, as though the deep patches of mottled dark hold strange and terrible secrets.
Alice stumbles up the front steps, praying that she won’t come face to face with her grandmother on this of all nights. She feels as though she is only hanging together by a thread. A late-night conversation full of the usual complaints and unwanted advice is the last thing she wants. She fits her key into the lock and pushes the heavy door. All she wants is to get upstairs and into her own room. She wants to crawl under the doona and lie there, possibly forever.
In her room now, with the door locked behind her, Alice sits a while on the bed. Then she gets up and opens the window and lets in the cold night air. The rain has stopped and the pale yellow moon has drifted out from behind the clouds. Alice thinks that she will remember this night for the rest of her life. It is the night when so many things came together and then . . . fell apart again.
There will be some kind of trial and she might have to testify. Who knows? It will all come out, and the gossips will have a field day, but she is not daunted. I came home for this, she whispers into the dark night, hoping her mother can hear. I came home to find whoever did it . . .
She picks up the yellow package that Tom had dropped into the office only days before, pulls out the prints and begins to flip idly through them. Here they all are. The one of her mother and her aunt in front of the car, then her mother and father on the verandah with little Alice. Then there is her grandmother as a young mother pushing the pram with a three-year-old at her side. Here is her grandmother as a bride outside the church, brushing confetti off the bodice of her dress and looking straight into the camera. Alice stares hard at that one, trying to find the cantankerous old woman in that young bride. Yes, she is there in the cool expression of delight. Alice’s grandfather had been a catch, the most eligible man around, and her grandmother had been smart enough to snare him. Alice smiles. It’s all there on her face!
There is one print at the end of the pile that she hadn’t seen. Tom must have liked it, because he has mounted it on board. It is of her mother and aunt standing by a fence. Lillian has Alice on her hip in a little smocked dress and with a bow in her hair. And there is her aunty Marie, smiling into the camera, with little Jonty, about three years old, dressed in shorts and a striped shirt. He is standing on tiptoes between Marie and Lillian, reaching up to hold hands with baby Alice, who is looking down at him in absolute delight. There they are, two sisters with their babies, all of them looking so delighted.
Alice’s eyes sting with sudden tears as she stares at the little boy in the photograph, hearing her mother’s voice, so clear and lovely in the cold night air.
Jonty is the nearest you’ll have to a brother, Alice.
Sadness has a familiarity about it that joy or excitement, or plain old happiness, simply can’t match – a kind of lived-in, homey feeling, like the worn nightie folded up under her pillow or the scruffy slippers under her bed. Who wants to be knocked around by love everyday? When you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, who seriously wants to be surprised by life? Not Alice. Not really. This flatness feels like an old friend coming home after being away. He has been waiting outside for everyone else to leave and his arrival is no surprise.
She sighs and slowly goes to shut the window and pull the curtains across. She takes off the lovely white top that she’d bought especially for the evening, peels off her jeans and puts on her old flannelette nightie. She slides under the doona, reaches out to switch the light off and waits for sleep.
TOM
A YEAR LATER
Luke says he likes to let his mind wander when he’s driving, that it relaxes him. The classy little European shitbox is flying along like a bat out of hell, way over the speed limit, and it’s on the tip of Tom’s tongue to ask if he’s ever thought about de-stressing some other, less lethal way but he holds back. Classic FM is blasting out into the silence between them, and Tom can’t help wondering if Chopin ever thought his sonata might come in useful as filler for two people who are still awkward with each after a big personal drama. Probably not.
‘You remember your camera?’ Luke asks abruptly.
‘Nah.’ Tom slumps down in his seat and closes his eyes.
‘How come?’
Tom shrugs irritably. He doesn’t take photos anymore. He doesn’t know why that is, but he sure as hell knows he doesn’t want to talk to his old man about it.
Tom’s car is in dock getting a new clutch. He’d planned to catch the train back to Warrnambool for his mum’s birthday bash, but Luke had a court appearance in the city and when he found out that Tom didn’t have much on, or a car, insisted on picking him up. Tom didn’t feel free to say that he’d been looking forward to the long train journey and a little solitary lead-in time. But here he is, doing the right thing, travelling home with his father, wondering if they’ll get there at all. Luke is such a speedster.
Closer now, and along this stretch of highway new developments rise up out of the landscape: innocuous little moles that look like nothing until you get closer. Then the alarm bells start ringing and you find yourself thinking of melanomas or diseased bone marrow. Hundreds of acres of undulating farmland and bush have been graded and pegged out into blocks. Paved roads eat into land that even last year would have been grass for sheep and cows. The odd display-home near the road, complete with those weird long brick entrances, announces the names of the proposed estates: Lockhart Downs, Sugar Loaf Hills, Teppling Mews. Every one of them is different but strangely similar. There are great stone entrances complete with water features and spiky plants, fake pillars and split-level, second-storey extensions. They sit there like bizarre signposts pointing the way to the future.
Tom can’t shake the feeling that he’s lived most of his life already. He might be only twenty-three but he can tell that from now on there will just be a few split-level diversions and a couple of spiky relationships until he finally drops off the tree. The main game has already been played and . . . he lost.
‘You think you’ll ever take another photo?’ Luke asks in a pointedly casual way that tells Tom he’d like to keep the conversation rolling. ‘I mean for pleasure?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tom mutters, figuring that his father’s insistence on them travelling back together should let him off the politeness hook.
Hooks . . . spikes, and nails.
Yeah, well, a year might have flown by but a word can bring it all back. And it does. Vividly. Skinny, handsome, blue-eyed Tom. Mr Cool Cat, with his camera slung over his shoulder, his smart-arsed ambitions, and his sneaky easy way with girls – except with the one that mattered. It’s amazing he didn’t twig to himself sooner.
Okay, his mum might be right – he’s probably depressed. Eating is mostly a chore and he’s got a rash creeping up his neck that is freaking him out. He doesn’t sleep too well, either.
He hasn’t spoken to Alice Wishart since that night the three of them drove home from the caves. Tom rang her up once when Jonty’s name was all over the local paper again and then once more before the sentencing hear
ing. Both times she said sorry and hung up. It’s all over now, Baby Blue.
He wishes he could have told her that he really did love her. Just in case she thought it was only some weirdo mixed-up stuff about her mother. Tom would like her to know that at least that part was real.
‘Hey, slow down,’ he says gruffly, pointing at the speedo, ‘we’re in an 80 zone.’
Luke turns as though surprised to hear Tom’s voice.
‘You’re right,’ he says mildly, and keeps going at the same speed.
‘You’re a newly married man,’ Tom jokes weakly, ‘so you owe it to your wife to be careful!’
Luke smiles and slows down just a little. But more as a kind of goodwill gesture than anything else. Tom sighs and has to laugh.
‘Don’t worry,’ Luke mumbles. ‘All under control.’
‘I’ve got a good chance of getting that job in South Melbourne,’ Tom adds.
‘Of course you’ll get it!’
‘Not if I’m dead.’
‘Okay,’ Luke laughs and lifts his foot off the accelerator this time. ‘I’d hate you to miss out on it.’
Tom isn’t seriously excited about the job. It’s with an advertising agency, for God’s sake, and that means frozen peas and pretty models in pretty frocks, lipsticks and airbrushed thighs and the rest of it. But he will have finished his course by the time they want him to start, and he plans to go to the States next year. He wants to buy a pick-up truck and drive from East to West on his own. For that he’s going to need money.
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