Reluctant Hallelujah

by Gabrielle Williams

  But there was this one I liked: ‘honourable’.

  Bringing honour to its possessor; consistent with honour. And, sweetly, ‘(colloq.) with marriage in view; honourable intentions.’

  That was a page I went to a lot – page 512 – and Jones was written all over it.

  There was ‘hooray’, and ‘hoodlum’, and ‘hope’.

  And ‘hooch’, which he’d have liked.

  ‘How are you going?’ Taxi asked me quietly, sitting on the couch, trying not to put too much meaning into the words, but also trying to balance those words perfectly so they asked exactly what he needed to know. He rolled a small green stone around in the palm of his hand. The stone I’d taken from Jones’s pocket on that day in Lavender Bay last year and given to Taxi just moments before. Quietly. Without having to tell him what it was.

  I put my forehead into my palms, unexpected tears welling into the cups of my hands.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  Scout put his head on my knees, shuffling in to get as close to me as he possibly could. Scout. Our new dog. Coco and I had found him walking around the lounge room on Christmas morning, a big blue satin ribbon tied around his neck. A kind of cute-puppy-equals-happy-daughter type equation. It hadn’t quite panned out like that, although he did haul me away from bad thoughts when he put his head onto my lap. And if my thoughts turned particulary grim, he’d sense my mood and jump up on my bed, licking at my face until his slobber wiped away my sadness. They say saliva has antibiotics in it, and Scout’s saliva did seem to have a medicinal effect on me, I had to admit.

  ‘He wants to go for a walk,’ said Taxi.

  Scout’s ears propped at the ‘walk’ word. I ruffled his feathery fur, getting right in to that sweet spot behind his ear.

  ‘No walk,’ I told him. But, being the positive-thinking dog he was, all he heard was ‘walk’, and he jumped back from me, wagging his tail and looking straight into my eyes, waiting for me to grab his lead.

  ‘I don’t mind taking him for a walk,’ Taxi said. The third time the ‘walk’ word had been mentioned within a minute. It was going to be difficult to say no now. ‘I’d like to,’ he added.

  I sighed, went into the laundry, grabbed Scout’s lead, and clipped it to his collar.

  We walked out our front gate, past the church over the road and down the street.

  I’d spent a bit of time in that church over the road in the past few months, sifting through the thoughts in my head and trying to put them into an order that made sense to me. Why Jones? If God was so ‘good’ – and I’d put my fingers up sarcastically to inverted-comma the word ‘good’ – why let that happen to Jones? If God was the Almighty, why not just make everything good and happy? Why let earthquakes happen? Volcanoes, tsunamis, car accidents, murder? What was the point?

  Why hurt Jones?

  And Father Brody would listen to me. He wouldn’t talk or argue or try to convert me to some kind of saintly vision. He’d nod and frown and shake his head and listen and never once did he try and defend what God did to Jones. Maybe he wasn’t so sure himself, anymore.

  ‘Your folks seem nice,’ Taxi said, as we walked down our street.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s good that they’re okay.’

  Mum and Dad had been found in an abandoned warehouse in Melbourne’s northern suburbs around the time the police were emptying their pistols into Jones at Lavender Bay.

  Jones was referred to as Sebastian Worthington in the newspapers, where he was described as ‘a troubled youth who’d come to the attention of the police on a number of occasions’. They said he’d become obsessed with Coco and me and that Enron was simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They suggested that Jones – being the irrational, dangerous, psycho nut-case that he was – took Enron along for the ride because he wasn’t quite sure what else to do with him.

  Dr Beleura, my State-appointed psychiatrist, said I’d gone through a trauma so intense he wasn’t surprised I muddled everything around in my head. He said the fact that we lived across the road from a church was probably the reason I’d come up with my ‘version of events’.

  And all I’d done was tell the truth.

  I knew I should be sticking with the story, but it seemed disloyal to say Jones was a psycho nut-job when he was so utterly utterly lovely.

  During one of our sessions, Dr Beleura told me the story of Elisabeth of Bavaria – Empress of Austria – who was assassinated by Luigi Lucheni.

  ‘He stabbed her in the heart just before she boarded a ship bound for Montreux,’ Dr Beleura said, his voice soothing, his manner calm. ‘The Empress was astonished as the ship set sail to discover that she was bleeding. To death. As she lay dying, she asked the doctor, “What happened to me?”, having completely forgotten the stabbing incident a few minutes earlier. It’s a very famous story.’

  I had looked blankly at him.

  ‘Shock will do that to a person,’ he explained. ‘In an attempt at self-preservation a person can become so detached from the trauma they’ve been involved in that they forget it happened altogether. Or they might have flashbacks, or become disoriented. Shock might make you reconfigure the events in fantastically outrageous ways that you’d never expect a soul to believe if you were thinking straight.’

  He meant me, with that one.

  I had felt I’d owed it to Jones to tell the world the truth. But when I saw Dr Beleura’s expression at the ‘Jesus was lying in a coffin in our basement’ part of the story, I realised there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting anyone to believe me, and my story had collapsed like the cardboard coffin we’d dismantled when we first went into the drains.

  I could have tried harder to prove it was true. I had letters from my mum and dad, Minty and Jools had seen Him. But I left it. Seeing Dr Beleura’s face made me realise I had to keep the story secret. All the letter from Mum would prove was that my mum was as insane as I was. And Minty and Jools would be called liars who wanted to get their faces in the paper by piggybacking on my story.

  Sometimes the truth just isn’t an option.

  ‘I hate what the papers wrote about him,’ I said to Taxi as we turned right at my street and started walking along Chapel towards Alma Road. ‘They said terrible things. I hate that everyone thinks he was psycho.’

  Taxi laughed.

  ‘He’d love it,’ he said.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘You didn’t see what they wrote. You were away.’

  Taxi laughed again.

  ‘Honestly? He’d have loved it. You know what he was like. One of his favourite things was to wind people up. Remember him with Enron at the start of our trip? Calling Jesus Santa just to get a reaction. He wouldn’t give a shit what the papers wrote. If anything, he’d be pleased they got it so wrong.’

  ‘No one would be happy to be portrayed the way he was.’

  ‘Do you know how I know he’d be happy about it?’ Taxi asked, stopping me in the footpath and looking straight into my face. Not something Taxi would generally have been comfortable doing. ‘He told me that night on the boat that the police were starting to wonder whether you were involved. He knew someone was going to have to take the fall for you. He was already planning something. The police coming to the park saved him from having to think up a convincing story.’

  The police had been tipped off about a completely different story to me and Enron and Coco. The police had gone to Wendy Whiteley’s garden because they’d been called about this strange guy in a wheelchair who was someone extremely important; believed to be dead but very much alive apparently. That’s what the guy who’d rung up had told the police.

  The guy who tipped them off never came forward.

  Sometimes I’d hear Coco crying in her bedroom, Mum shushing her and brushing back her hair as she cried that it was ‘all my fault, Dodie was mad about him and he was crazy about her, and I wrecked it because I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut.’ And Mum would whisper to her that it was ridiculous for her
to blame herself, and that she knew I didn’t blame her at all, and I’d have to walk away because I didn’t trust myself with what I might say if I really gave my opinion.

  Scout bowed down to a kelpie, dog-talk for ‘let’s play’.

  ‘He was really into you, you know that?’ Taxi asked me.

  Scout chased the kelpie, his back paws slipping in the wet grass.

  ‘You were the first girl he thought was worth something,’ Taxi continued.

  Scout mouthed at the neck of the kelpie as he ran alongside him.

  ‘He had plenty of girls chasing him, but you were the first one that gave him … who believed in him. He had a pretty low opinion of himself, even though he acted like he thought he was hot shit. But with you, it was different. He wouldn’t have done what he did for any other girl I’ve ever seen him with.’

  ‘You say that like it’s a good thing,’ I said.

  ‘You know what?’ Taxi folded his arms and hugged himself tight. It was cold in the park. Icy. It was probably going to rain in a minute. ‘You gave him the best thing. You gave him the sense that he was worth it. He said to me that you made him feel like he meant something. He had something to do. He was important. He’d never had that feeling before you. You gave him that.’

  Someone threw a ball for their dog and Scout ran after it, stealing the ball and bounding naughtily away.

  ‘His story is spreading through the Arimathea network,’ Taxi went on. ‘He’s a hero to people the world over. Not that he would have cared about that, but it’s nice anyway. And he was happy that day. Those last few days,’ Taxi said. ‘He was very bloody happy.’

  And then he was hugging me to him, holding me so that my sobs didn’t split my seams.

  ‘But you can’t keep doing this,’ he said into the top of my head. ‘You can’t keep being sad. You made him so happy, but he’s making you so sad. It’s not fair. Not fair to you, and not fair to him. You didn’t even sit your exams.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But he loved that you were so smart. We’d sit in our room and he’d be asking Enron all about you. Finding out what your favourite subjects were, what you were like at school. The fact that you were such a smart girl, well, that made him proud. Because if you were so smart, and you chose him, that made him a good choice.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do with myself,’ I said into his shoulder.

  ‘I’m going back overseas in a month. Come with me. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve seen. The people I’ve met. You should come. Heaps of people have a gap year. But you can’t spend your gap year crying. It’s just not you. And it’s not what Jones would want.’

  ‘Why Jones?’ I asked him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I looked up at Taxi.

  ‘Why did he call himself Jones when his surname was Worthington?’

  Taxi grinned.

  ‘He didn’t like who he was. He didn’t like being Worthington. He’d decided to call himself Jones about a week before we met you. He thought it was a kind of no-man’s name. But it was funny because when he met you he’d sing that song, you know that one that starts off, “Me and Mrs Jones”.’

  I laughed through my tears.

  ‘He was yours for keeps,’ Taxi said. ‘Keep him here,’ and he touched at his own chest, right in the centre, right at his core, ‘but don’t stay sad,’ and he held my crumpled chin in his hands. ‘It’s not what he would have wanted.’

  Taxi won’t tell me where Jesus is.

  Each different country we come to, I ask him, ‘Is this it? Is this where you brought Him?’ and he grins at me and says, ‘Jesus is all around,’ in a mock-sermon voice and then we go to a youth hostel and meet more people and find a few sneaky adventurers who will take us down into the local drains.

  I still find it scary going underground and I can’t think too hard about the fact that what we’re doing is completely illegal and there are buildings and semi-trailers and people piled thick on top of us and I could be deported if we got caught. But I go into each drain because I know Jones would have gone, so I go down there for him.

  I’ve met a lot of people these past few months. I’ve had romances and crushes, and I’ve even met this one French guy who I think might be worth getting a visa for. His eyelashes aren’t as long as some I’ve seen, but he’s sweet and funny, and it took me a while to get used to the fact that someone with this rocking French accent could crack ridiculous jokes and tease and wind people up.

  I wonder if I’m being disloyal, if being with Didier means I’m forgetting about Jones. But every time I go in a drain, or past a church, I think of him. Every time I see a can of Coke, I think of Jones. And don’t even start me on how I feel when I see department-store Santas.

  A girl doesn’t forget a guy like Jones in a big hurry. Even now, when none of us are front-page news any longer, he’s always in my head.

  My name is Dodie.

  Doe – as in don’t change a thing (well, a couple of things I’d change).

  Dee – as in delighted to have known you, Sebastian Worthington Jones.

  Dodie Farnshaw.

  There’s nothing reluctant about the hallelujah I have for:

  Ath, Draco and Apex from the Cave Clan for being brilliant guides to the underworld of Melbourne.

  Gab Doquile for reading an early early early (possibly too early?) draft and giving me the thumbs up.

  Andrew McAliece and Meg McMena for listening over and over and over again.

  Marina Messiha for a most excellent cover.

  Kristin Gill for helping sort out title dilemmas.

  Erin Wamala and Tina Gumnior for getting it out there.

  Cat McCredie. Your name should be on the cover too (except then you-know-who would know who you are).

  Laura Harris, for taking a chance on something a bit different.

  Donica Bettanin for right-on feedback and taking me to Frankfurt with her.

  Jenny Darling for being the best agent ever.

  And finally – Nique, Harry, Charlie, Mac and Andrew. Hallelujah, praise the universe, that you lot are in my life.

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2012

  Text copyright © Gabrielle Williams 2012

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  ISBN: 978-1-74253-493-0

 
  Gabrielle Williams, Reluctant Hallelujah