I rang Amy.
‘You should take it down,’ she said.
‘The whole page?’ I had been thinking about it, after all.
‘No, just Svenson’s rant and block him from the page while you’re at it.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t censored anyone else, even the swearing.’
‘This is different,’ said Amy. ‘Svenson’s having a go at the whole town, he’s practically gloating. It’s not funny, Jacob. I told you about the cancelled shifts, didn’t I? Dad says he’ll have to lay off people soon.’
Gloating. It did seem a bit that way.
‘He mentions you by name, Jacob. It’s like the two of you wrote that post together.’
‘But I don’t even agree with him!’
‘Maybe not, but that’s the way it looks.’
She had a point there.
‘Let me think about it.’
The whole phone call had bordered on angry, from Amy’s end anyway, which didn’t seem right and since I was done with study the way a bucket can’t take any more water I said, ‘I’m taking Mindy for a walk, let her run around a bit in Meredith Park. You want to come?’
‘I’ll bring Hermie,’ she replied instantly, meaning the ball of noisy white wool her family had named after Hermione Granger.
There were families in the park and other dogs happy to play with our two while we sat on a bench, although they came back every few minutes to see if any more surprises had appeared from Amy’s pocket. She was a softy around animals.
‘Do you think you can be in love with people on different levels?’ she asked when we’d grown tired of complaining about exams.
‘Like levels in Angry Birds or Halo?’
She pushed at me gently for making fun of her. ‘Not video games. It’s a serious question.’
I was having too much fun with her reaction to be serious. ‘Yeah, I suppose if you worked in a big building, you could be in love with a guy on the second floor and another one on the fifth.’
‘Jacob!’ She pushed me right over this time until my head and shoulder were touching the seat. Her body pressed down on top of me in mock anger, but if she thought this was punishment for dissing her she hadn’t seen inside my mind. I loved the weight of her on top of me and the way her hair fell over my face.
‘Help, help,’ I cried pathetically. ‘I’m being crushed by the most beautiful monster in the universe.’
The dogs rushed towards us, unsure whether we were really fighting or playing a game they wanted to be part of. Before I wanted her to, Amy sat up, pulling me after her. ‘I want an answer.’
‘Different levels?’ I asked, reluctantly breeching the fun of the moment with some serious consideration. ‘You love your parents on a different level from, like . . . a girlfriend. Being in love is different from family, is that what you mean?’
‘Not really. I was thinking just about the romance thing. Is it all the same emotion and you’re either in love or you’re not, and if you are then you should want everything with that person?’
‘I haven’t had a lot of experience, Amy. You’re the only person . . . What do you mean by everything? Like every moment of the day, sharing each last little thing and all the tenderness you have inside you?’
‘Yeah, I get that part,’ she said, although the confusion about the rest was as strong as ever in her voice. ‘But there’s a lot to being in love, right – it’s not just words and going places together.’
‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed. She had me going now. I didn’t think she was talking about sex, but I couldn’t help thinking she meant the intimacies that a couple share when they’re alone and that certainly wasn’t us at that moment.
‘I think if you’re really in love, then there’s no holding back. You don’t even think about picking and choosing. It’s part of the fun that you don’t have to, because everything about the one you love is just right.’
Amy didn’t seem to like my answer.
‘Hey, just a theory,’ I said in a put-on voice and with my arms splayed wide. I pulled them in quickly and reached for her hand instead. ‘So soft. The hands of a princess,’ I went on in the same voice. ‘A princess should be pampered by those who adore her,’ and using my other hand I swept back the curtain of her hair and pressed my face into the crook of her neck. Was anyone watching? If they were, they’d have seen me kiss Amy behind the ear.
‘You’re nuts, Jacob, but you’re fun to be with.’
‘Even if you can time my hundred metres with a sundial,’ I said, drawing an uncertain grin that said she thought I really was nuts, but there was no point explaining Tyke’s remark in the garage when her name had hung so lightly in the air.
I straightened up and immediately Amy leaned across and kissed me playfully on the nape of the neck. ‘There, we’re even, but no way am I calling you my prince.’
The exam timetable was sticky-taped to my door with Monday afternoon circled in red, and to save Mum coming back for me in the middle of the day I asked her to drive me to school as usual.
‘Good luck,’ she said cheerfully, as I was clambering out.
‘Swap places?’ I offered.
‘Not on your life,’ she replied through a grim smile. ‘I hated exams thirty years ago. All yours now.’
I’d be done with exams soon enough, I reminded myself on the way to the library. Chloe arrived not long after and since I could see the screen of her laptop I knew she wasn’t studying.
‘What are you up to?’ I asked, going over.
She turned the laptop and quickly clicked through the websites she had open; they were all about universities. ‘I’ve applied to three unis. Just looking at the buildings and stuff and dreaming a bit to psych myself up for this afternoon. What about you? What did you put in for?’
‘Me! Oh, I’m staying here to work at Merediths.’
Chloe’s face dropped. ‘You mean you didn’t even fill out the forms?’
‘Why would I, if I’m staying here?’
‘But Mr Svenson was looking straight at you the day he talked about uni after the holidays.’
‘Yeah, well, Svenson’s not working out my future. Mum wants to be sure things are okay for me when I’m out in the big world,’ and I tried to make a joke out of it by sketching an extravagant globe with my arms. Didn’t work.
‘Do you really need looking after, Jacob?’ Chloe asked. ‘You get by just fine, as far as I can see. Maybe you can take care of yourself more than she thinks. It’s your life, not hers.’
That last bit was getting close to the edge. Chloe didn’t know the hours, the kilometres, the dogged energy Mum had put in to make my life as free as it was and if she’d said any more I might have had a go at her about it. Would have been a shame because Chloe was only being a friend. It hit me at that moment what a friend she had become and that I wouldn’t like to lose her any more than my group around the picnic table.
‘Just for argument’s sake, if you did go to uni, what would you study?’ she asked.
I stared at her blankly, because, honestly, I’d never given the idea a single thought.
‘Forensics, what about that?’ said Chloe. ‘Your mind seems to work that way. The importance of evidence instead of guesswork like that business over Mahmoud’s knife.’
‘I can’t see myself working with the police,’ I said, making a face. ‘The knife thing was to protest about injustice.’
‘Law, then,’ she suggested. ‘Lawyers fight for that sort of thing.’
‘A lawyer. Me!’ Lawyers were big time. I couldn’t get my head around it, not at first, but in the slow seconds afterwards the idea kind of grew on me. Must have shown on my face, too, because Chloe ran with it.
‘Be a good fit for you – the way you’ve defended Mahmoud, you’re a regular Atticus.’
‘What’s an “atticus”?’
‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ she said.
I stared at her, now totally confused.
‘It’s a book,’ Chloe
answered, a little exasperated, as though it was something everyone should know about. ‘It’s a movie, too, so maybe it’s on the classics shelf at your Blockbuster. You’ll work out what I mean.’
‘A lawyer. Never imagined I could . . .’
‘You should do more imagining, Jacob. There’s hundreds of things you could do, not just the lawyer thing. You’re the one who should be checking out these sites,’ she added, nodding at her laptop, and her voice now had lost its serious tone to let Chloe the friend come through, wanting the best for me.
She flicked from page to page, listing off ideas, and when she was done leaned back in her chair. ‘Well, have I changed your mind?’
I had to admit, she had me thinking, even excited. ‘But I’ve missed my chance,’ I said, partly in disappointment, but also because it gave me an ‘out’ and I didn’t have to decide one way or the other.
‘You can still apply. Just have to pay a late fee, or whatever,’ she replied, shifting the ground so quickly I was thrown off balance in a way that had nothing to do with CP. The restlessness I’d sensed in myself had taken a holiday since I put my arm around Amy, but there it was, jumping out at me from Chloe’s laptop, not glossy pictures of universities – something harder to see that slipped right into me to connect with a loose end that was flailing around inside my chest like a power line brought down in a storm.
There were more Senior shirts in the yard when Chloe and I ventured out to the canteen at morning tea. I looked for Amy among them, but there was no sign of her yet.
On the way back, paper bag dangling from one hand and with Chloe walking patiently beside me I glimpsed two figures shooting wildly across the playground. My CP warning system tracked them cautiously, not that it did any good when one of the boys circled behind us. Both boys were laughing. Probably just some end-of-year prank between friends.
The second boy came on, following his quarry in the same wide line behind us just as the first shot around my shoulder and took off in front of us at a sharp angle. I was watching him go when his pursuer followed, but this boy flung out an arm to use me as an anchor for his change of direction.
Bad move. He didn’t actually tug me very hard, but then, he didn’t have to. I tottered off balance and spun slowly clockwise with arms outstretched, fighting to stay upright like a ten-pin and finally losing the battle, landing on my bottom with enough momentum to send my shoulder into the dust. The paper bag spewed its contents across the spindly grass.
‘Oh sorry,’ came a shout from somewhere above me.
The boy had come back, though not for the reason you’d expect.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said again, offering a hand to help me up.
‘Get away from him, you idiot,’ said Chloe. She’d heard the note in his voice, too, and if there was any doubt she need only look at his face. The boy was my tormentor from the toilets and his expression left no doubt he thought the whole thing was a joke.
So that made two ‘accidents’. I wondered if he’d pushed me on the stairs, as well.
‘Piss off,’ I told him, wishing I could cram as much scorn into mere words as Chloe.
When she stooped, eager to help, I waved her away as politely as I could. ‘Nothing damaged. I’ll get up on my own,’ and thankfully she backed off.
The boy was still standing over me, though, making no effort to hide the smirk I’d seen once before and instead he bent low so Chloe couldn’t hear him and whispered, ‘No more bodyguards, eh?’ and, satisfied with this odd warning, he sauntered off.
16
truman
Biology was never my favourite subject and on Monday afternoon I was simply relieved to have it out of the way.
‘Wasn’t too bad,’ I told Mum when she asked.
I’d walked into town after the exam, stopping at Blockbuster to get the film Chloe mentioned, then waited for Mum at Merediths.
She noticed the grassy smear on the ball of my shoulder.
‘I had a fall. Lost my balance.’
‘That’s twice recently,’ she remarked.
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ I said, exaggerating my tone to cover what I was really thinking.
No more bodyguards.
The piss-tough bully had sneered at me too deliberately and with too much confidence in his own immunity for my fall to be a random case of wrong place, wrong time. I just didn’t want to join the dots to where it was pointing. Could I even ask Mitch about it? I hadn’t spoken to him since last time at the picnic table, but if I was being honest, we hadn’t talked the way we used to all year. He was Dan’s mate now, more than mine.
A Svenson word came to me while I waited for Mum. Exposed.
That night Dad came straight home from work, had a beer on the back porch while Mum made dinner and then sat in his old place to form the horseshoe around our dining table. I don’t think we’d sat together as a family since last time Tyke was home and Mum seemed to appreciate it, laughing loudly at the weird things customers asked for at Merediths.
‘Front counter will be part of your job next year,’ she reminded me.
‘Actually, I want to talk to you about that,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll go to uni instead . . .’
Judging by the looks I got, you’d think I wanted to train as a serial killer!
‘That’s if I get the marks,’ I added quickly, to take the edge off the moment.
Dad stopped eating and stared at me while Mum put down her knife and folk altogether. ‘Next year’s already worked out for you, Jacob,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but I’ve had a chance to think about it lately and . . .’
I’d made up a little speech that borrowed a lot from Chloe, not that it would matter as long as I meant what I said, but faced with their blank expressions my words scattered like mice. All I could manage was, ‘It’s my future and I want to talk it all over with you before anything gets decided.’
Mum and Dad glanced at one another, then they focused on me. ‘We’ve talked about the job at Merediths all year, Jacob, and you’ve never said anything before,’ Mum complained, as though I was trying to wriggle out of a deal.
‘Back when you were setting it up, I hadn’t thought about going to uni,’ I said. ‘Now I have thought about it and I want to change the plan. Svenson thinks I can handle uni, no problem . . .’
Big mistake. Didn’t I know that guy’s name was poison in this house?
‘Mr Svenson hasn’t got a clue what you can handle and what you can’t,’ Mum snapped at me. ‘He sees you a few times a week.’
The rest of what she meant didn’t need to be spoken – that she’d cared for me every moment since I was born, which made her the one who knew what I could do and what I couldn’t.
Mum picked up her fork and started bullying things around her plate until she stabbed at a potato. She wasn’t the only one who wanted to stab something. I deserved a say in what I could do, but Mum had swatted away my suggestion like a fly.
I retreated to my room after dinner and lay on my bed, corpse-like, while all the things I should have said played loudly in my mind, until the exam timetable taped to the back of my door goaded me towards the desk. I wasn’t a natural studier, let’s be honest about that, but Svenson had warned us all how fourth term would decide who got into uni and who didn’t. I ripped into the books as a way of getting back at Mum.
For an hour my concentration held out against a voice that said study was a pathetic way to fight back. What use was it when the other side didn’t even know I was on the battlefield? If I wanted to change anything I had to go toe to toe, persuade them, win the argument at the dinner table, not my desk. I wanted to win that argument more than I wanted to go to uni!
Once I gave way to that sneering voice, nothing else would stay in my head. I sat back, ready to throw the maths book at the wall, and when I didn’t actually do it I felt doubly ashamed at my cowardice. I needed something to take my mind off the whole mess and reached for my laptop, hoping some new comment
s had turned up on Mahmoud’s page. While the laptop was firing up, though, I had a better idea – To Kill a Mockingbird lay in the gaping mouth of my school bag. I’d watch the first half-hour and see what this Atticus guy was like.
There was a disc already in the drive. The Truman Show. I took it out – then dropped it back into place. Maybe this was better. I was worried I’d end up watching all of Chloe’s movie instead of getting back to the books, while Amy’s – I thought of it as Amy’s, anyway – was halfway through.
Okay, so there was Jim Carrey playing smiley, good-guy Truman, prisoner in a little town that seemed more like Palmerston the longer I watched. I understood now why Tyke had talked about stars being painted on the inside of a huge dome, because that was Truman’s sky. His life wasn’t even his own.
I remembered something I’d said to Chloe after Soraya had asked for my help. I can’t think of anything worse than having your whole life mapped out by your parents. No way I’d put up with that.
I’d been talking about Soraya Rais, but maybe I should have taken a look in the mirror.
To say that I didn’t sleep well doesn’t quite describe my night. There were no dreams of myself as Jim Carrey’s Truman – dreams are never so straightforward. My problem was the conscious thoughts that hauled me back each time I drifted close to sleep. These were mostly replays of the passive way I’d sat at the dinner table letting Mum and Dad set me aside like a piece of boiled pumpkin they couldn’t be bothered with. I lay there remembering other times I’d simply accepted what they wanted; in fact, the only time I’d stood up to them was over Mahmoud Rais. If I could do that for a kid who wasn’t even a friend, why couldn’t I do it for myself?
The Beauty Is in the Walking Page 12
