Girl Saves Boy (8 page)

‘Yeah.’ Jewel took it from me and tucked it carefully into her sketchbook. ‘Geraldine Grisham. I forgot to give it to her.’

‘You know Geraldine?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ She drank what remained of her hot chocolate. ‘Are you finished?’

Jewel left a ten-dollar bill on the table.

‘Thanks. Do you have a job?’ I asked.

‘My grandparents left me a bit of money,’ she said, as if she resented this.

Every little thing she said about herself, I put away in a file. I imagined I was an FBI profiler. I took each detail down and committed it to memory. I tried to formulate an identity for her from the things she gave away. I tried to figure out if she kept secrets. What her family was like. Whether she’d had many boyfriends. What she wanted to be when she grew up.

I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything.

We left the smoke and stepped out onto the street—the haberdashery was closed now, and it was dark. It was very peaceful.

She began walking down the street.

After a few steps, she turned and asked, ‘You coming or what?’

‘I live the other way,’ I explained.

She was surprised, I think. Expected me to live closer to her house, wondered why I’d walked out so far.

I wanted her to ask, and I wanted to be able to talk to her some more, and I wanted her to want to know as much about me as I wanted to know about her.

I wanted too much.

She looked awkward. ‘Oh, all right. Bye,’ she said.

I stood there and watched her walk away. When she was outside the chemist, I called out to her.

‘Are you going to the school fete on Saturday?’

This was what was going through my mind, over and over, like a chant, an incantation:
You’ve got nothing to lose
.

She turned around, as if she didn’t know whether to walk back or not. She stayed where she was. It was so quiet in the street, we could speak normally and still hear each other, quite a few metres away.

‘Why?’

‘It’s pretty good. Real community sort of thing and all, but they get good bands in at night. And the teacups and the other rides through the day are great.’ I smiled at her.

‘I might come along then.’

‘All right.’

She paused and smiled and glanced at the ground. ‘I’ll see you then.’

I didn’t know whether to feel elated or depressed. I watched her walk away down the street and around the corner.

Then I went my own way, under the streetlamps. And, as unclear as things were before, they only became more clouded.

And I still thought about her eyes and her lips and her hair and her smile and I wondered what was wrong with me, apart from the obvious.

Sacha’s Favorite Foods
His mother’s bacon & eggs breakfast
Chinese takeaway
Cheap Wednesday Pizza, a tradition started by his dad
Barbecues at Little Al’s house
Geraldine’s signature zucchini slice

Jewel

There was water all around me, and I was standing on it—I was walking on it. I was walking on water.

The water extended as far as the eye could see in every direction, nothing but water and sky, gentle blue. Complete silence. I don’t know why, but I was wearing a pristine white dress that twirled around my legs in the breeze.

I walked, and I walked. It was like walking normally, on a hard surface, but it wasn’t logical. I could walk on water, but it made no sense.

Suddenly darkness fell. I could hear waves tumbling. The water had been still only moments earlier. The moon was dim.

The waves churned beneath my feet and I swayed, unsteady, then I slipped down into the water.

I was submerged for a moment, submerged in total darkness and silence. Then I burst through the water’s surface and choked down as many gasping breaths as I could before another wave could toss over me and push me back under.

As I paddled the water, it became almost sticky. I looked around and, in what little light there was, I could see that the water had turned to blood. The type of blood you get from a large wound, leaking uncontrollably when you get a deep cut, when you’re in a car accident.

I’ve never cut myself, but I imagined that if someone was to try to kill themselves that way, this would be the blood to ooze out.

My white dress was stained red.

My head dipped under again, and I got a mouthful of blood. When I resurfaced, I retched and retched. The inside of my mouth was warm and sticky. Metallic. Salty.

I could make out two bodies near me, floating. Two boys. My brother, and Sacha.

‘Jewel!’

My brother was spluttering, still alive. I gasped and splashed towards him, and the blood thinned out to water, and the moon lit up everything.

When I got over to him, I realised it wasn’t my brother at all. It was Sacha.

‘Where’s my brother?’ I panicked.

Sacha started treading water beside me. ‘He’s dead, Jewel, he’s dead.’ Then he disappeared.

And then I woke up.

When I was young—really young—I used to think that the kids who had money, who were popular at school and who did well at things must have had horrible home lives—abusive parents or nasty siblings or lived in cupboards under stairs.

It’s kind of sick when you think about it, but what I figured was that life should be fair—everyone had to have good and bad things in their lives, and no one could have a wholly good life or a wholly bad life because that would upset the balance of things.

I know now that I was wrong.

I haven’t spoken to anyone about my brother, apart from school counsellors who forced me to splutter sparse details (because it’s so goddamn
healing
), and brief words with Grandma and Grandpa, which weren’t as bad as the student welfare counsellor asking me to bare my soul for her, but were still incredibly uncomfortable for me—I don’t think that will ever change.

I was never openly blamed for my brother’s death, but I could tell people thought it. I’m not a mind-reader, but in the piteous looks I was given at the funeral, the sneers from old ladies who’d heard the rumours, I felt it. I heard it. I knew they were thinking it.

Because even though I was an eight year old, someone needed to be blamed.

That’s because of a basic fact: old people die. Grandparents and distant relatives. People with heart disease and failing lungs and colon cancer.

Children die too. Little bald kids in hospitals. Not kids full of life and vitality like my brother. Not so unexpectedly, randomly.

When I think about it—which is a lot, even though I try not to; I can’t get it out of my head—it could have been me in the child-sized coffin. The old ladies could have been casting looks at my still-alive brother, looks filled with suspicion and resentment. I think it would have been worse for him, since he was older.

And I always think,
Why me? Why did I live?

When I was young—before his death—I had my sick ideas about the world being completely fair. As I got older I had this idea that everything that happened was meant to happen that way and it couldn’t be changed. Both ideas were ridiculous, and now I don’t believe in anything.

I think a lot—when all you do is draw and go to school and sleep, and you don’t have friends or a proper life, you do a lot of thinking, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels like it sometimes, and I feel like a lonely, horrible beast that no one would ever love. Could ever love.

I think about what would have happened if my brother had lived, and I had died instead? What if we had both survived?

I’ve had dreams where my brother doesn’t die that day, where our lives go on perfectly. Our parents stay together. Our grandparents come and stay with us for holidays. I stay at my school.

These dreams stopped when I was twelve or thirteen and I gave up on the idea of things being good again. Now that I’ve come back to live with my mother, they’ve reappeared, and I dream them when I’m lying in bed at night, trying to get to sleep.

In dreams of my brother still alive, our parents are still together—I still know my father and he’s a good man, my mother is still the mother I remember from my childhood—and my brother’s well and truly finished school and I’m finishing school. I’ve got a spot lined up for a Fine Arts degree next year. My brother’s becoming a lawyer or a doctor or something equally smart and important. He’s got a girlfriend who’s a lot like True. I’ve gone to the same school as True growing up, and we’re such good friends we’re going to live together. I know that boy Sacha, and we’re good friends as well and maybe even more.

Then I fall asleep and I get the nightmares, then I wake up and get the real world, and I can’t decide which is worse. I don’t know how much longer I can endure either.

My dreams can never be reality. Not one part of them. Coming up with these grand schemes that involve dead people and strangers is an exercise in futility. I just feel worse in the morning, remembering the plans for the future I’ve concocted in my head the night before.

People always say all the right things:

‘Don’t blame yourself.’

‘He’s in a better place.’

‘Everything happens for a reason.’

‘It’s okay to grieve.’

‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

All these words are empty. They mean nothing. They’re printed in self-help books on grieving and healing that you find in clearance bins outside bargain book shops and newsagents. They’re just words, and they don’t do anything and no one cares that much.

All the offers and kind words stopped when I went to my grandparents. Originally, I was going to come back and live with Mum after a few months. But gradually, Grandma and Grandpa’s became home. After a while, Mum stopped calling so much.

Of course, I wonder where my father is now. At least I know that Grandpa, Grandma and my brother are dead and buried. Who knows where my father is? Is he dead or alive? Who even knows
who
he is?

I resent him the most—leaving Mum, forcing her to send me to my grandparents. I wonder how things would have turned out if events
after
my brother’s death had been different. If Dad had been able to stay with us, stay with Mum. For us to become a family again. Maybe even if Grandpa and Grandma had sold their country property and bought a place near us, so that they could have looked after me and I still could have had Mum around as a parent. What would have happened if I had been able to stay at the same school, to go to school with True, to have met Sacha earlier?

It was so awkward at school after my brother’s death. There were so many different stories that spread around. Kids weren’t necessarily mean— just curious, shocked. They liked my brother. Kids don’t die. Had I really pushed him? Even the well-intended things hurt.

Dad left—just drove off one afternoon with an overnight bag full of clothes and never returned— and Mum got worse with the anti-depressants and the overdoses. And soon after that I was sent away from it all.

It’s a blur, when I remember it: it all moves way too fast, and I think it was like that back then, too— everything speeding by, nothing for me to hold on to. There’s Mum passed out on the ground and me on the phone and a woman wearing a pantsuit and she has a very faint moustache, then Grandma and Grandpa cuddling me, squeezing my hand, whisking me away to their house, in the country. At first it seemed like it would just be a holiday—I’d stayed there during the summer in the past—but then I started school, and more time passed, and my life had changed drastically and without my permission.

Everything was different—my brother had died, but I’d lost my whole family, left behind my friends and school and everything I knew, and not once did someone ask me if I wanted this—and I couldn’t go back, no matter how much I wished I could.

I haven’t said his name out loud in so long.

Ben. His name was Ben. Benjamin Valentine.

It’s such a common name. I’ve known so many boys called Ben. But—and this will sound pathetic for sure—every time I hear the name, I think of him, of his face, of my older brother whom I half-hated half-loved and admired like only an eight year old can, and I almost cry. It was ten years ago, and still I want to cry, and do cry.

Eight years with Ben. Ten years without Ben. Though I remember little about those eight years, I can guarantee that these ten years have been worse.

In bed at night, I cry for him dying. I also cry for me staying alive.

I’m lonely. Incredibly, intensely, unendingly lonely.

It’s this constant ache all through me: numbness and anger and sadness. The emptiness is all-consuming.

It’s not just my brother being dead; it’s not just my father disappearing.

It’s not just being sent away to my grandparents, and it’s not just my grandparents both dying on me.

It’s not just my mother with her anti-depressants and a life of her own, without me.

It’s not just feeling responsible for Ben’s death, and it’s not just being friendless.

It’s everything and it’s all too much and everything is weighing me down at once.

I feel broken on the inside.

And, worse, I feel like no one notices, and no one cares and I could die quietly and everything would go on as it is, but minus me.

I just wish that someone would listen and care, and not just Geraldine, because she’s getting paid to listen, paid to care.

I resent that. But, because Geraldine is so nice, I try not to.

S
ACHA

It happened almost a year after I met True. We were both nine.

And it’s a startling memory, because it was when I was first confronted with the idea that one of my parents could die (of course, shortly after that came the realisation that I myself could die).

True’s parents had been old when she was born. late-thirties. But still, her father should have had a few more years in him. Her mother was into her fifties now.

I didn’t find out until later that it was a genetic heart problem. I think it was something that tormented True a lot as she got older—that perhaps her life would be cut short by forty years or so, that she’d be struck down with a heart attack way too young, like her dad. Maybe that was why she was trying to squeeze so much in, working so hard, wanting to accomplish everything she could before it was too late.