“Charlie bought it for me. That’s why we met up, because he wanted to give me a gift. That’s all.”
Her mother glares at me for the first time, seething and suspicious. It’s clear she thinks it is bullshit. My face is a mix of fear and earnest corroboration.
“Well, I should think it’s time for you to head home now, if you don’t mind,” she says to me tersely before grabbing Eliza tight by the arm, tugging sharply.
Eliza turns and smiles thinly as she is led away.
“Bye, Charlie. Thanks for the book.”
“You’re welcome,” I call out, then add, “I’ll see you at the Plaza,” but I don’t think she hears, and so my first hint of wit gets caught in this wall of leaves.
I pull back the green ropes and watch Eliza’s mother huddle over and shake, sobbing into her hands, as they walk toward their home. I notice the balance has shifted—Eliza is now leading her back. Her arm around her waist. Leaning in.
I think about Eliza’s manner. So dry and centered. So matter-of-fact amid the panic. I watch her climbing the garden steps to their front door, holding her weeping mother. Someone is there to meet them with an outstretched hand and a look of concern. I shrink behind the branches. And then, swift as a knife, it occurs to me. A rash of sparks coats my skin. My heart almost leaps from my chest, and my brick slides.
Eliza Wishart knows something.
***
Before I can close the front door, my mother has slapped me. Hard and sharp. Much like Mrs. Wishart, but with considerably more venom. It stings for a long time. I touch my face, shocked. My mother calls out to my father:
“It’s him, Wesley! It’s okay!”
It is rare for my mother to slap me. It is even rarer for her to call my father Wesley. I can only assume this means I am right in the shit. As I’d walked back down our deserted street, I had hoped she might have forgotten my stealthy exit this morning.
Then she slaps me again. Harder. I cry out in protest. The interrogation begins.
“What in Christ do you think you’re doing? Where have you been?”
“At Jeffrey’s!” I yell at her and look away, scowling. I hope my eyes aren’t glassy.
“Bullshit, Charlie. Don’t lie to me!” She slaps me again, and shakes me by the collar.
“Stop it! It’s true!” It obviously isn’t. I am a terrible liar.
“I was over there three hours ago looking for you, young man! You’re lying! Where did you go? Where have you been?”
“I just went to the library! Calm down. I’m sorry!”
“Calm down? Calm down! Jesus Christ, do you want people to think you have no parents?”
I want to slap her wrist from my collar. I want to kick her shins and run back outside.
“What does that even mean? I just went to the library!”
“Oh! You just went to the library, did you? After I told you not to leave this street. After I told you not to leave this house without changing your clothes. It is dangerous out there, Charlie, okay? Do you know that? There’s a bloody kidnapper on the streets, and you’re walking about like you’re lord of the manor! Who do you think you are?”
“What?”
“A girl is missing, Charlie,” she hisses at me, close to my face. She digs her nails into my arm. “Laura Wishart. She has gone missing. Do you understand that?”
“Missing or abducted?” I ask. I want to know what she’s heard.
“Don’t answer back!” she snarls, and moves to slap me again. I shift my weight, and she cops me across the ear. It chimes through my brain. For a moment it feels like I’m underwater. Without thinking, I push her off me. She looks stunned.
“Go to your room!” she screams.
“I can’t! There’s a wasp in there!”
“What?”
“There’s a wasp in there! That’s why I couldn’t get changed!”
“I don’t care!” she yells, pointing toward the back of the house.
“Well, that’s been patently obvious for some time!”
“Excuse me?” She leans in, aggressive, speaking through her gritted teeth.
“Goddamn it!” I yell. “I’ll go and get bloody stung!”
And I march off, with her close behind. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just swore in front of my mother. That’s as close to hara-kiri as you can get without a sword. I slam the door and chock it with a thin Penguin paperback before she can burst in and thrash me to death.
She’s hollering from the other side, but my immediate concern is the wasp that may or may not be trapped in here. I quickly scan the walls and the ceiling. I snatch my open copy of The Naked and the Dead from my bed and retreat into a corner. I wonder what Norman Mailer would think of me right now. He’d probably smirk and shake his head and call me a fugging pussy. Probably come at me with a penknife. I am hot with anger and shame.
The yelling ends. Book poised, I search every inch of my sleepout. It seems, miraculously, the wasp is gone. For now. But elsewhere, of course, I’ve shaken up a whole hive of problems.
My mother bursts through the door like she’s the Gestapo. The wedged paperback skids across the floor. She glares at me and issues a beckoning finger like a gnarled coathook. She is holding a shovel. I don’t know why. I hope it’s not a weapon.
“Come with me,” she says.
I don’t argue.
I follow her outside. It’s the middle of the afternoon and unbearably hot. I squint through the glare. I stand motionless as she aims and stabs the spade tip repeatedly into the ground with purpose, like she’s chasing something she wants to kill. I cock my head when she stops. She’s fashioned the outline of a circle, roughly the diameter of my armspan. I frown.
My mother thrusts the shovel at me. I take it.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“A shovel,” she says shortly. I can’t place her tone. I can’t tell if she’s hurt or angry or pleased with herself. Perhaps she’s all three.
“I know that,” I say.
“Well, start digging, then. Right here.” She thrusts a finger at her crude markings.
“What? Why?” I ask meekly. I’m genuinely confused.
“You’ll find out later. When it is deep enough, you can stop.”
I shake my head.
“What? No! It’s too hot!”
Her nostrils flare as her finger lifts and jabs at my chest.
“Charlie, I’m not going to tell you again. You will keep digging until this hole is deep enough. If you do not, you’ll spend the rest of this summer in your bedroom, wasps or no wasps. Do you understand? And I will take your books away. Every single one. Those are your choices.”
“What? But how is this fair? This is ridiculous!”
“I’m not here to be fair. I’m here to teach you how to do what you’re told.” She starts to move back toward the house. She knows she’s won. She always wins.
I grip the shovel limply and stare at this patch of ground like it has betrayed me. Like it’s the portal to hell itself.
I scowl and shick the spade into the earth and imagine I’m slicing clean through her neck. I’m sweating already. Flies are hovering around me like I’m the Holy Grail and I spasm in fright when I feel them land. I stab, lever, and lift, cursing my mother in the dirtiest language I can muster. This is a whole new degree of vindictiveness. Maybe when I’m finished with this hole I can throw her in it. The work is made a little easier by my anger. If anything, it’s cathartic for a short while. But this only lasts until the sandy top layer of earth melds into a dense clay and a blister forms on the webbing of my palm. I strip my wet shirt off and throw it to the ground. I kick some clay over it, knowing who will have to wash it. I am thirsty. I am dying. I am so bloody hot, I feel like I’m digging my own grave.
I try to think of what purpose this hole could possibly serve. I am hoping, maybe because I am roasting out here, that it is to accommodate some breed of shady tree. Like a blue gum or a paperbark. Or an enormous mulberry tree, lik
e Mr. Malcolm down the road has. Something to read beneath. That would be nice. Maybe even a peppermint tree, broad and moppish and spicy, like the ones lining Eliza’s street.
I think of Eliza and me, standing in the shade. Her clean girl smell, the bloom of heatblush on her cheeks, her sad turndown eyes. The strange, absent way she looked toward her house when she told me about Laura. I wish I could have held her hand, or brushed her cheek. I wish I could have told her everything was going to be okay. That Laura would turn up soon.
But Laura Wishart is dead. I know that. I watched Jasper Jones cut her down. Then we threw her in the water. And now they’re looking for her, and when they find her, they’ll come for me.
I wish I’d asked her more. I have so many questions. Eliza may not know what I know, but I think she has something up her sleeve. Does she suspect anybody? Does she know about Laura and Jasper Jones? Does she know about Jasper’s grove? Does she know Laura used to steal away there of an evening? Surely not.
But maybe.
Eliza Wishart holds the pages of the book that leads to that horrible ending. Or at least some of them. But how to pry them out of her fingers? I have to see her again. And soon. So I can give something to Jasper when he comes to my window. So that we might clean up this mess.
My blister bursts. I suck in air through my teeth. And I look down to see a copper-colored centipede just centimeters from my foot. It’s huge. It’s as big as a python, surely. Does it eat bats? It could take down a cat, easy. Or a small child. I gasp and drop the spade, and run to the fence.
Of course, it’s at this point my mother emerges from the house like an angry outlaw exiting a saloon. Our flyscreen door claps against the side of the house, then slaps back into place. She looks sharply from the hole to me.
“Excuse me, I don’t remember telling you to stop! Keep digging, Charles Bucktin,” she says sternly.
I close my eyes and exhale.
“I have a blister.”
“And I have a lazy son. Both of them are painful. I’ll give you some iodine when you’re done. Come on! Dig! Is that your shirt? Get it out of the dirt, you filthy boy! Now! Show some respect for your things!”
Walking back to the hole, I smirk inwardly at having pissed her off, but it’s a fleeting comfort. I take up the shovel and hold it aloft like a spear, but the centipede has disappeared. It’s worse when I can’t see it and I know it is there. It’s probably lurking underground, waiting to strike, like some maniacal alien tentacle from The War of the Worlds. My spine is tingling. I suddenly need to piss.
“Dig!” my mother yells, and I do so.
My mother has become so hard. It’s perplexing. She’s always been curt and impatient, but there used to be warmth beneath it all. I don’t know. Maybe she’s finally fed up. It’s crystal-clear to everyone except my father that she hates Corrigan. I suspect she always has. Of course, I can only speculate, but the fact that my parents were married and moved here six months before I was born suggests that maybe they were shamed into eloping and alighting someplace far from the city. Or maybe this was the only place my father could get posted. Maybe it was a sense of adventure: a fresh start in an expanding coal town.
Seems unlikely.
See, my mother comes from old money. And I’ve gathered from overhearing various snide comments that she was expected to marry into more of it.
But my father comes from no money at all. My grandfather was a laborer who died early from tuberculosis. From what I’ve pieced together, my dad’s elder brothers were forced to leave school to keep them in food and board. Being the youngest by far, it was easier for my dad, and he was able to stay on at school, where he excelled. They were all convinced he would become a doctor or a lawyer. They wanted him to have the opportunities they never had. And so I think he disappointed everybody when he announced he was going to study literature.
My parents met at university. It’s hard to think of them as young people, with healthy hair and shiny skin. It’s even harder to imagine them in love on the banks of the Swan, excited to be with each other. I wonder if my dad intended to be a writer back then. I wonder if that’s what drew my mother to him. I don’t know. But he was a long way removed from what she had grown up with.
When she fell pregnant with me, there was just enough time for them to elope and for my dad to finish his degree before the bump was too pronounced. My mother never completed her studies, and my father never published a novel.
And thirteen years later, a cave full of bats could see that she’s bitterly unhappy here. That she’s dissatisfied with her lot and her plot. After my baby sister died, I think she gave up for a while. I think it was with a sense of resignation that she played out a role for herself. She joined the Country Women’s Association, mixed with Corrigan’s leading ladies, helped cater for events, and joined all the amateur pleated-skirt sporting fraternities and committees. She ticked all the community boxes. But now? Now she’s just angry. The varnish is tarnished. She can’t be bothered retouching the gloss. She’s at the end of her tether.
Recently she’s taken to visiting her family more and more often, particularly over this summer. Where before she might go to the city once or twice a year for an extended stay, she has started taking more frequent weekend and overnight trips, and she rarely even announces that she’s leaving. She just makes sure my father and I have meals and clothes and she leaves without fanfare, as though she’s off to the butcher.
And it used to be that she would go away and come back refreshed. She’d be lighter on her feet. She’d bring gifts and gossip. Her mood would have lifted, and she’d be less stern with me and kinder to my father. But now when she arrives home she’s bitter and irritable, as though she’s been led back to her cell after a foiled escape.
And it’s occurred to me that one day she might not come back at all. She might simply refuse. I know her family pressure her. I know they coddle her with self-serving concern, that they constantly remind her of the things she’s missing, the things they feel she deserves. And I don’t really blame her for being seduced by it. It’s what she grew up with, I guess. It’s right up near the surface of who she is, the girl who always got what she wanted. But I do blame her for feeling ashamed of us. I get that prickly sensation every time she returns these days: that she doesn’t think we’re good enough. And that, I can’t abide. My father is infuriating, but he’s a good and honest person. I know how other fathers treat their sons, and I know I’ve lucked out. And as for me coming along as I did, I had no choice. I was timing and chance. I was shit luck. But I didn’t do anything wrong.
I sink my spade into the hard clay and think about what my mother was born into. Her luck and lot. As though there were any difference between us other than that. How does it mean anything? I don’t know. But what about Eric Edgar Cooke? What about his timing and chance? If he were born in Nedlands like my mother, would he have visited it all those years later like he did? Would he have wrought such terror in those streets?
I pause and wipe my brow. It lacquers my hand. I could lick it, I’m so thirsty. What is this bloody hole for? A koi pond? A bomb shelter? I am hot and filthy and fed up. The clay is hard and dense and heavy. The clump of dirt to my right has attracted a brazen pair of kookaburras, whom I welcome with relief. They sift through the mound of earth and feast on insects. I pause to watch one glug down an earthworm.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
It tilts its head, regarding me with what feels like pity. Its friend suddenly flutters away to a neighbor’s tree to laugh at my misfortune.
“Your friend’s an ungrateful bastard,” I growl. It looks at me shrewdly and then seems to shrug.
I shake my head and keep levering up half-spades of caramel clay. One thing that strikes me is the silence of our street. Usually it would be humming, but it’s quiet as a church out there.
In a few hours I’ve dug to the depth of my thighs. My burst blister is beyond pain now. This surely can’t go on for much longer. This is li
ke Dickens or something. Surely the Geneva Convention protects me from having to dig anymore.
I keep going.
And I settle back into considering Cooke and his simple, bitter reason. He just wanted to hurt somebody. It sounds so vengeful. But was that really it? Was he out there laying into some kind of version of his father? Was he fighting back through other means? But why would Cooke prey on women, then? Why would he make victims of the innocent, like his father had done to him? It makes no sense. So maybe it was that sense of power that he wanted. After a life of being force-fed shit, of beatings and being trodden, he wanted to turn it right round on itself. Maybe he wanted to become his father. To swap roles. To finally be on top. He wanted people at his mercy. He wanted to hurt them. Just like he’d been hurt. Maybe he wanted a whole city to know that fear. Could that really be it? Could that be the same of Mad Jack Lionel?
Laura Wishart is dead. Someone killed her. That’s all I know for certain.
I need to see Jasper Jones. I need to see Eliza Wishart. I need to know more about Mad Jack Lionel. I need to know more about Laura. About Corrigan. About the things that make people do what they do. I need to narrow things down, start pruning back. Until then, I’m a whirring zoetrope of half-thoughts and worries. Beset by bright, dizzy flashes and harried by harpies.
I start to dig like it means something. I try to lose myself in the task. I don’t want to think anymore. It feels like there’s a tourniquet around my head. I never asked for this.
By twilight I am up to my ribs and I feel as though I have acid coursing through the veins of my arms and my back. As soon as I lay down my spade, I feel stiff and exhausted. I lean on the wall of the well and inspect my palm. My glasses are grubby, but I have nothing clean to wipe them with.
As though she has sensed my lack of activity, I hear my mother burst out the back door and stride toward me. I don’t turn around. She stands at the edge of the hole in front of me, hands on her hips, nodding slowly. I’d like to think she’s grudgingly admiring my craftsmanship.
I’m waiting to hear the reason for which I’ve been toiling in soil all afternoon. I look at the hill of earth to my right and can’t help but feel a little proud of my work. There’s a small blush of real achievement. And there’s another part of me that craves her approval. I want her to admit that this is a bloody brilliant hole. I want her to recognize my effort. To tell me I’ve done a fine job. That it is perfect for its purpose.
Jasper Jones Page 11
