The Beauty Is in the Walking

by James Moloney

  My cane got me home, not because it held me up when my clumsy legs wouldn’t go as fast as I demanded, but because its wolfish eyes glared at me whenever I opened my hand to look. I’d been so inside myself when I first left Amy’s, I’d simply carried it without letting it touch the ground. When I did, it was as a weapon to scar a shallow gouge into the gravel footpath. Another and another. It was a wonder there was anything left of the rubber stopper, but those angry slashes replaced shameful tears as my way of handling what had happened.

  It couldn’t help me when I got to my room, though. I lay on my bed for the rest of the day with an arm across my face; didn’t pick up a book, didn’t care. If Svenson had demanded a word from me, I’d have had one ready, a particularly Palmerston word, he would agree.

  I was gutted.

  20

  last exam

  Sunday wasn’t done with me yet. With the light mostly gone from my windows, Mum knocked at my door.

  ‘Jacob, dinner’s ready.’

  ‘I’ll come get a plate in a minute,’ I answered, planning to avoid her. ‘I’m studying. Last exam tomorrow.’

  She opened the door and looked down at me stretched along the bed. I hadn’t been off it for hours and she knew it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Been very quiet since you got home.’

  ‘Fine, fine. I am going to study. Before sleep is the best time, they say. Stays in your mind better.’

  ‘Sounds good, but I want us to eat at the table together, first. Some things I need to say,’ and she went off up the hall, leaving me to follow.

  I sat up too quickly and had to wait on the edge of the bed until my head cleared. When I did stand my arm brushed against something that thudded to the floor. My cane. I took it with me to the dining room, wondering if it would be the last time I’d used it.

  ‘It’s not there to wind you up,’ I told Mum when she watched me prop it against the table. ‘I just feel better with it in my hand.’

  An emotional crutch, I told myself, and despite my low spirits a snort of laugher sneaked out.

  ‘What are you chuckling at?’ Mum asked. She seemed pleased that I hadn’t retreated into a solemn mood simply to endure this dinner with her.

  I waved her question away. ‘Nothing that’d make any sense.’

  She accepted that, then asked, ‘Can I see it?’

  Only when she extended her arm did I realise she meant the cane and too quickly my reluctance showed. Mum pulled her hand back to her side. More than that, her face dropped and her shoulders slumped like a leaky balloon.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jacob, I’ve been holding out on you. It wasn’t fair of me.’

  In a handful of words the tables had turned and Mum was now the reluctant one.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Your cane,’ she said meekly. ‘I rang the specialist on Friday. He said if a cane helped with your confidence, you should use it.’

  ‘My confidence?’ I muttered, uncertain of what she meant.

  ‘With walking, staying on your feet, that sort of thing,’ Mum said, surprised that I didn’t understand.

  If it seemed that way, it was because confidence had a wider meaning and I was trying to work out why it had touched me so strangely. When Amy had used her razor blade on me today so much had dropped out and I wondered if I could have made it home without that wolf’s head. I was on the verge of tears again, not because of the Amy thing, but in gratitude towards the cane at my side. I grasped the handle and felt the tears back off like a wary thief when the victim shows some fight.

  ‘Was that why you were crying on Friday night?’

  ‘You heard, did you?’ she said. ‘Yes, one of the reasons.’

  So there were more. I didn’t want to ask what they were and that seemed to brand me a coward all over again. ‘I didn’t know what to do, whether to say anything.’

  ‘Best to let me have my tears,’ she said and even managed a smile. ‘You want to know the rest, don’t you?’

  ‘You seemed pretty upset.’ How could I say that the sobs wrenching out of her came from so deep I’d imagined blood across the bedspread?

  ‘It was the silence, the emptiness of the house,’ she said. ‘I’d finished some Council work on the kitchen table and went out to the lounge room. You’d gone to bed. Maybe you were studying. There was no music, no sound from your room, the lounge room was dark. I could have turned on a light, I suppose, but instead I sat in the darkness knowing your father wasn’t coming home and I thought this is how it will be, some nights at least, and I wasn’t ready for it, wasn’t ready for my life when you’ve left home same as Tyke. Then there was the massage I wouldn’t do for you. That was unforgivable.’

  I watched her for signs of tears, but like me she had those under control. I doubt her body had had time to make any new ones after Friday, when everything came out of her. We had that in common, then. Two empty beings.

  Dinner was going cold on our plates so we made a start, switching to safer topics. ‘What exam do you have tomorrow?’

  ‘English,’ I said, attempting a wry smile to soften the connection to her favourite teacher.

  ‘Your Mr Svenson, eh? He’s certainly brought you on in his subject. I can’t deny that.’

  Mum pushed a few stray peas into the edge of her mashed potato as though they would form her next mouthful. Instead, she carefully placed knife and fork on the side of her plate and, after a pause, gazed across at me. The movement was so like the last time Svenson’s name was mentioned at this table I feared she’d read his comment on Mahmoud’s wall.

  ‘I’ve been holding out on you about that, too,’ she said. ‘If you want to go to Brisbane next year, give uni a try, you should do it.’

  She let me take that in, watching my face while I could only guess at what those words had taken out of her.

  ‘I was unfair to you,’ she went on. ‘Being so against the university idea and insisting you work with me at Merediths. I told myself a couple of years would show you what working life is all about and then you could decide what training you needed, that it would be best for you, but, really, it was what suited me.’

  Mum paused in a way that told me her next words were the ones she found hardest. I was wrong about the tears, too. They were already glistening at the edge of her eyes.

  ‘Jacob, what you said about being a dog that I needed for company . . . I was very hurt, but only because there was more truth in it than I could admit. The way I saw it, Tyke was always going to leave as soon as he could, but your CP meant I’d have you for longer.’

  I don’t know how she didn’t cry at that moment, although it’s a borderline thing when tears roll down a woman’s cheek yet she stares straight ahead and doesn’t make a sound.

  ‘You can live with Tyke if that’s what suits you both, or you can try for a place in one of the colleges. We’ll support you whatever you want.’

  I’d thought today would go down as the worst day of my life, yet somehow it had turned up a gift I couldn’t have expected. A free pass. Mum was practically waving me out of the door.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Mum. It’s not like I won’t see you every few weeks. Tyke will bring me back with him when he comes to visit and uni has a ton of holidays.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ Mum agreed with the scorn of someone who barely took a holiday at all.

  She seemed relieved to make light of something after the solemn way she had been talking. We both were. Without knowing what I’d done, I had taken hold of her hand, much as I’d reached for Amy’s. I stood up and so did Mum and there in the dining room we hugged. God, how I needed that hug and the grip Mum had on me showed it was the same for her.

  ‘It’s your choice, Jacob. It always should have been,’ she said, summing up, it seemed to me – yet behind her smiles I detected a sadness creeping back into place. She had the resigned look of someone who has done the right thing, even though it wasn’t the right thing for her.

  I
woke on Monday morning and knew immediately that I couldn’t leave Palmerston. Everything I’d ever needed Mum had done for me, got for me, made others jump until it happened for me. How many trips to the city, how many hours of exercises, how many fights did she win with doctors because I was her son? She’d never let me endure anything alone and last night she’d been asking me to return the favour, just for a year or two. Those weren’t her words, just their meaning, and understanding that wasn’t something Svenson had taught me, either. I couldn’t leave her to cry herself dry like she had on Friday night.

  I’d tell her later and in the meantime I had one last exam. Considering the decision I’d come to overnight, I wondered why I was so keen to do well. There was a reason, though. If I was in the mood to repay debts, then Svenson deserved his due.

  A hundred metres short of the school gate I forgot about exams. A girl on the footpath could be . . . No, when she looked around I knew it wasn’t Amy, but she’d be in the school grounds somewhere. For a few moments I couldn’t swallow and a hand moved to my stomach as though there really was a razor’s incision beneath my shirt.

  I took the roundabout way behind the library until I could see the entrance to the gym, and when we were called inside I kept my eyes low and local to the few metres around me until I was seated with the cane on the floor beside me again.

  Later, when all the papers were collected and we were allowed to leave the gym, I waited behind, hoping to make my exit as Amy-free as my entrance. I had the entire gym to myself when Chloe appeared in the double doorway, silhouetted against the harsh summer light as Amy had been not so long ago.

  ‘How’d you go?’ she called from ten metres away. Her voice bounced around inside the empty space as though a hundred people had asked the same question.

  I gave a noncommittal shrug like you were supposed to, then entertained her with some of the poses I’d worked out in front of Mum’s mirror. ‘This cane’s the best present I’ve ever had,’ I told her and my honesty earned the most fabulous smile.

  ‘You should smile like that all the time,’ I said. ‘You’d have every boy in town on your tail.’

  ‘Like I’d want that?’ she laughed, but I think she liked what I’d said.

  ‘It’s not just walking, you know. This cane’s got me through a lot in the last few days.’

  She lost her smile, but knew not to ask. ‘So, it’s over, and we just have to hang around until Friday. I was wondering, since you’ll have a bit of time, whether you’re going to do anything more with Mahmoud’s page?’

  Good question, and one I had no answer for, not there in the gym.

  ‘You’ve been proved right, after all,’ she said, prompting me.

  ‘I don’t care about being right.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you’ve got to feel some kind of vindication. You wouldn’t be human, otherwise. I thought what you posted on Saturday was pretty tame, really. People are watching, Jacob, more than show up on the wall.’

  She was hinting at something that begged me to ask, but Svenson was heading our way with a thick folder of exam papers in the crook of his arm.

  ‘My reading for the next few days,’ he announced, making a face.

  ‘I was just asking Jacob about the Facebook page he set up for Mahmoud. Now that there’s been . . .’

  Svenson jumped in before she had a chance to go any further. ‘Yes, I’ve been following it. I posted some thoughts myself a few days back and they seem to have disappeared.’

  He knew how those pages worked, who decided what stayed posted and what didn’t.

  ‘I took it down,’ I told him plainly.

  ‘Ah, censorship,’ he declared, but not in a serious tone. ‘That’s not what I’d expect from one of my students, after all the discussions we had in class.’

  Yeah, okay, the tone was still lighthearted, but the words were meant to sting.

  ‘What you said wasn’t fair to all the people who’ll lose their jobs at the meatworks,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t having a go at them,’ Svenson responded, and this time he was serious. ‘It’s the town that’s brought this disaster on itself because of the way it treated the whole Rais family. People could have spoken out, supported them.’

  ‘We did,’ I pointed out. ‘People like Chloe here. She was part of the knife protest.’

  ‘Chloe’s not from Palmerston,’ countered Svenson. ‘She’s an outsider as much as I am.’

  No, I thought to myself, no one’s as much an outsider here as you, Mr Svenson.

  ‘I’m a Palmerston local,’ I said.

  ‘Are you, Jacob?’ he came back at me. ‘Are you the typical Palmerston type? You’ve got the sense to get out first chance that crops up.’ He shook the exam papers cradled in his arm. ‘Makes you different from a lot of these kids.’

  I’d talked to Chloe about uni, but not Svenson, except for listening to him in class. I glanced her way, wondering if they’d discussed me. Whatever the truth, he was getting on my goat.

  ‘You think the only people who stay here are the losers who can’t make a life somewhere else. Is that it?’

  Svenson wouldn’t answer my challenge, but his silence and the hard look on his face showed it was exactly what he believed.

  ‘You make it sound like civilisation hasn’t reached this far, like Palmerston isn’t fit for human beings, like you can’t live a decent life out here.’

  If I imagined I’d put him on the back foot, I’d have to think again. This was Svenson, the man who insisted on a single word to convey meaning.

  ‘It’s so much less than life can be out here, Jacob. That’s what I wanted students like you and Chloe to see, and others in that room with you if they would only lift their sights a bit higher.’

  Saliva was gathering in my mouth even as I willed the muscles of my throat to do their job. All those hours of therapy and I’d never needed them as much as I did now. Svenson was going down.

  ‘I’m fed up with the way you go on about Palmerston,’ I told him. ‘That comment you put on Mahmoud’s wall was full of shit.’

  ‘Jacob!’ Chloe gasped.

  I was too fired up to take any notice and kept my eyes on Svenson.

  ‘You dump on the town and you’ve never taken the time to see all the good things about it and the people who give more of themselves than you’ll ever do, to family and friends, to people they hardly know.’

  I was thinking of Mum, of course, but I didn’t have to ‘lift my sights’ much higher to add Mr Henry who’d driven me up to Kibble’s paddock and Mrs Schwartz who’d come back to her home town to run herself ragged for every kid in her school.

  No point listing them off to Svenson. I kept at him. ‘People here don’t ask a man what he thinks of Mahmoud Rais and then march him off to hell if he gives the wrong answer. In your own way, you’re more prejudiced than anyone in Palmerston.’

  That did it. The twin ‘p’ sounds shot bubbles free from my lips.

  I turned towards Chloe, to see whether she’d noticed, and found her shocked, right enough, although not at my lip-lapse. It was the look in her eyes more than anything Svenson might have said that made me limp away at warp speed, aware for the first time that we’d been standing in the mugball court. Just the place for a bit of argie-bargie, I decided. There wasn’t a mark on me, but I felt as battered and bruised as if I’d ridden on Dan’s back after all.

  I was too stirred up to worry about going the long way round behind the library. There were still kids in the quad between me and the gate, milling in loose circles, laughing, so light with relief they might have floated away. To avoid them I detoured via the picnic table where my group had met so often. Only too late did I discover they’d gathered for a nostalgic farewell, two on one side, two on the other, making me wonder if there’d ever been room for me at that table. All I could do was stop, turn aside, find another way. Dan and Bec had their backs to me, but Amy caught sight of me. Stared. If she’d whispered to the others, Oh shit, there’s Jacob, t
he others would have turned, so when they didn’t I knew she wanted me to vanish as much as I wished I’d gone a different way. Well, we both got our wishes, didn’t we?

  I backtracked into the quad where my classmates recounted the exam or plans for Schoolies, more likely, or remembered teachers’ antics from last week or last term, or maybe they were simply dusting off twelve years of school. Despite what I’d said to Svenson I didn’t know if I was one of them and they seemed content to peer straight through me. Would I have stopped even if a voice had called me over?

  I escaped through the school gate at last and made for town and in my unhappy imagination the townsfolk seemed to turn away from me here, as well. Had they heard about the Facebook page? Whenever I saw two heads dipped together in conversation I worried they were saying, That O’Leary boy’s been saying things.

  I’d planned to walk home, proudly, with my new cane to add a little swagger, but seeing Amy had drained the pride I’d need to carry it off and those turned-away faces evaporated what was left. When a twinge in my back warned me against more heroics I retreated to Merediths, hoping Mum would drive me home. She was busy with a customer, though, and I had to wait in the same empty chair near the door, this time without the glow of victory.

  I replayed my rant at Svenson and especially the stunned look on Chloe’s face. I’d lost a friend, there. Bloody idiot, just when I was really starting to like her. Not that it mattered, of course. Once she was gone from Palmerston I wouldn’t see her again.

  Only that morning I’d decided to stay and now I’d cut myself off from everything that made me part of my home town. Sitting in that chair, wearing my CP like a shroud of eternal childhood, I was utterly alone.

  For three days I barely left the house. I wouldn’t let myself think about Amy and did anyway. The scene in her bedroom seemed on permanent loop in my mind until I imagined ghoulish ways to cut open my head and take it out with my bare hands. I’d hoped for so much out of the two of us together. Time and again through those three days I’d sit on the edge of my bed with phone in hand and her number on screen, daring myself. I’d say how sorry I was for being clumsy, sorry I’d even tried to kiss her. I just wanted things to be the way they’d been.