Jellicoe Road (8 page)

“What was I saying?”

Raffaela shrugs. “I’ll get you some water.”

She leaves the room and Jessa sits on my bed. After a moment or two I know that she’s worked out what I was mouthing.

“Taylor,” she says quietly, confused. “You said that your mother wants to come home.”

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming because I’m in a tunnel and in reality I don’t do tunnels. And down in the tunnel I smell something vile. I can’t identify it, but it consumes my whole being and I start to choke, unable to breathe. But then a hand grabs me and pulls me out and I know it’s the boy in the tree in my dreams and he tries to resuscitate me, but his mouth is rotting and his breath is foul. And I scream and I scream, but nothing comes out.

Thoughts of my mother begin to consume my every moment and they sweep me into an overwhelming feeling of bleakness and a desperate need for Hannah. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Raffaela knocks on my door when she sees the light coming from my room but I ignore her. I just sit up
and try hard to stay awake because sleeping isn’t safe anymore. I find myself Googling any name I remember my mother using. It was never the same name for long and that probably had to do with the profession she was in. She tried to change my name once or twice, convinced that someone was after us.

“They’ll take you away from me,” she’d say. “They’ve done it before.”

But I didn’t want my name changed. It was all I had.

The cat is no more settled than when I brought him home but I refuse to let him go. Sometimes I head to Hannah’s place straight after school and try to get some rest there or I sit up in the attic and read. In this room I feel comforted. I like the box-like quality of it, the way the roof slopes, the perfectly cut square in the floor, the trapdoor that blocks out the world below, the skylight that on a clear night allows you to see every star you would want to see in the galaxy. Sometimes after we had been working all day on the house, Hannah and I would sit up here and just talk. She never spoke much about her family except a few times in this room. If I asked her anything about them she’d just say they were all gone and that if she allowed herself to give in
to the whole sadness of it, she’d never ever be able to operate like a normal person again.

“I’ve been in that void,” she told me once. “Don’t you ever give in to it.”

But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I’m tired and the feeling that I’ve had for a while—that something is hunting me down—becomes all-consuming and I’m frightened that one morning there will not be enough to keep me going. Except maybe the pages I’m holding in my hands. They comfort me, these characters, like they’re my best friends, too. Like Jude felt when he returned that second year and they were waiting for him. Give me a sign, I keep on saying to whoever can hear me in my head. Give me a sign.

But most of the time I wonder how much Hannah is a part of this story and this school. Was she the leader of a community who thought she was weak and usurped her first opportunity they got? Did she experience a coup at the hands of a Richard-like, fascist-loving, backstabbing creep? And where did she get this idea that there was peace between the Townies and Cadets and us?

I find some chapters to read that seem intact.
I’m running out of them because so many are half-finished or written in a scrawl that I can’t quite understand. There’s this part of me that doesn’t want to deal with the fact that one of these characters is lost to them and I’m frightened that I will come across the chapter where they find him, because I know, deep down, that it’s not going to turn out the way I want. That someone in this story is not going to get out of it alive. It’s how I feel when I think of the boy in the tree in my dreams. Is he there to prepare me for something so devastating that it will lodge me in that void that Hannah spoke about?

Just when I’m about to work out a sequence of pages, I hear a window smash and I jump. I had locked the front door on purpose. Because Hannah’s house without her didn’t seem so safe anymore.

Quietly I crawl to the hole in the floor and peer all the way to the bottom. I see nothing but shadows and hear nothing but the sounds of breathing. I want to call out but something frightens me into silence and I sit and wait. Listening. I hear the heavy sound of footsteps on the wooden stairs as they make their way to the second floor. My heart is rattling uncontrollably. I reassure myself that nothing out here can be too
frightening but I’m anxious all the same.

There seems to be nowhere to hide except under the stretcher bed in the middle of the room. The space beneath it is tiny, but I squeeze myself under and take a deep breath and then there’s total silence. From where I’m lying, I can see half the manuscript sitting on the floor. The other half’s with me. I reach out my hand until it aches, trying to touch it to drag it over, but as I do, my shoulder lifts the stretcher bed above me. I drop my arm and the stretcher bed hits the floorboards. Suddenly the footsteps begin again, slowly ascending.

Whoever it is has reached the second landing. I can imagine them standing there, looking up at the hole in the ceiling, taking hold of the ladder—one step, two steps, three steps, four. And there it is. The back of a head appears through the trapdoor but I can’t quite make out who it is. He lifts himself up and then crouches to pick up the pages on the floor and I know what his next step will be. To turn around and look in the only place there is in the room to hide.

I know it’s the Brigadier. I know because of that thumping sound inside of me and the only option I have, apart from being caught, is to lift the stretcher
bed across my head and just throw it. Quietly I roll up the papers in my hand and stick them down my jeans and I get ready. The footsteps come closer and the boot stops right in front of my nose. I can hardly breathe but I need to move.
Just do it
, I tell myself.
Just do it and bolt!

“Are you okay under there?” I hear him ask. He uses a soft tone, like he’s trying to entice me out with the good-guy approach. But good guys don’t smash windows to get into someone’s house and good guys don’t freak me out as much as this man does.

“It’s okay. You can trust me.”

Just do it
, I tell myself again.

“I don’t want to scare you but I’m coming down,” he says, and I block out his voice because it is so familiar and the familiarity makes my heart beat fast and I know I have to get out.
Just do it
, I tell myself. Slowly I watch him crouch and then there is his hand on the sheet ready to pull it up, ready to grab me out of that space and do whatever he wants to do, whatever he may have done to Hannah. The rage inside of me at the idea of it makes me scream and I shove the legs of the stretcher to the side. I hear the impact of steel on his head and a grunt of surprise and next
minute I bolt, crawling to the trapdoor, down the ladder, down the stairs, out the front door, and racing for my life, my hands flailing as if I am trying to grab as much air as possible to pull me forward, like freestyle swimming on land. When I feel as if I’ve run as much as I can without being winded, I take a detour off the track and huddle under one of the oaks and I stay there. Just breathing. Softly.

I realise, after a moment or two, that I am not alone. Slowly I look up, beyond the tree trunk, higher than the branches, to the very top. There, in broad daylight, is the boy in my dream staring down at me. It’s like he has climbed out of that nocturnal world that I refuse to visit anymore and has decided to track me down. The sun blinds me as I look up, trying to cover my eyes, but then I hear a sound and I realise that he has brought the sobbing creature from the tree.

I feel hunted, with no place to hide. No solace, no belonging. Just an empty need to keep moving away from whatever or whoever it is that’s after me.

As usual, what awaits me when I get home is dependency. Ten questions before I can even get to the bot
tom of the stairs. About maths equations and parent pick-ups and permission to go to town and laundry crap. Then there is the nightly job of looking through every item of clothing and through the cupboard of our latest resident arsonist, checking to see if she has attended her weekly counselling session and having her sign a contract stating that she won’t burn us in our beds that night.

Once I’ve been assured of that I go to the kitchen to see if those on duty have prepared dinner. There are about sixty kids in the House usually, but with the year twelves gone we’re down to fifty until next year’s year sevens arrive. For dinner, mostly, we have spaghetti bolognese or risotto, and jelly for dessert, so hampers sent by parents are quite popular, as are the recipients.

On most days the roster works perfectly and on other days it is a total disaster. By six that night I haven’t even reached the stairs to my room and when word comes that our House co-ordinator is coming around to check our rooms, the juniors especially are in a frenzy.

Later, I pass the phone stand and give it a glance before I begin walking up the stairs and I see two
words on the notepad that stop me dead in my tracks.

“Who wrote this?” I manage to say, breathlessly.

No answer because I don’t think they’ve heard me.

“Who wrote this?” Still nothing. “
Who fucking wrote this note?”

Silence. But a different kind. The year nines, tens, and elevens appear on the second and third landings, their faces shocked. The juniors come out of study, standing in the corridor watching me.

“I…I did.” Chloe P. stands there, Jessa next to her, an arm on her shoulder like some kind of angel of mercy.

“When did she ring?”

“I don’t…I could hardly hear…”

I walk over and grab her by the arm. “What did she say?” I’m shaking her. “I told you to call me if she rang. Doesn’t anyone listen to me around here?”

I don’t realise until she’s crying that my fingernails are pinching into her and Jessa is gently trying to dislodge me. She’s crying as well, as are half the year sevens. The rest of my House are looking at me like I’m some kind of demented monster. I leave them standing there and start to walk upstairs, my
hands shaking, clutching the note, wanting it to have more than the words
HANNAH CALLED
on it. I want a number or a message. I want
anything.

Raffaela comes down the stairs towards me. “You look terrible. What’s happening?”

I want to slow down the pace of my heart but I can’t. The more I hear her speak, the harder it beats.

“Everyone’s…” she begins.

“
What
? Everyone’s what? Disappointed? Thinks I’ve lost it? Thinks someone else should be doing this?”

She stares at me for a moment, a cold angry look on her face. A look I’ve never seen before. “You know your problem?” she asks quietly. “It’s that you’re never interested in what anyone else is feeling. What I was trying to say before you rudely,
as usual
, interrupted me, is that all of us are worried about
you, not
about this situation, and we think you should just try to get some sleep and let us take over but you don’t care because the difference between you and us is that you fly with…with…I-Don’t-Give-a-Shit Airline and we fly with a friendlier one.”

It draws a crowd. I think Raffaela raising her
voice tends to do that. It’s mostly seniors and year tens, but I know that the juniors are listening from downstairs. The past leaders of my House would be rolling in their graves if they knew about the shouting and mayhem that has taken place in this House since they left.

“You’re right,” I say, walking up the rest of the stairs. “I don’t give a shit.”

In my room I lie on my bed, sick to the stomach, and I want to cry because my mind is working too much. All I know is that there is something not right. It’s in my dreams, it’s inside my heart, and without Hannah here, it’s an all-consuming feeling of doom. Like something’s coming and it’s something bad. I try to feed the cat but he scratches me until my arms are red raw, and I let him because I want to feel something other than this emotional crap. Sometimes we sit, the dying cat and I, staring at each other like in a Mexican stand-off and more than anything I want to ask him what he has seen. What was the last thing Hannah said to him? But he stares at me; even in his sickly old age he is feral with fury, his hair matted beyond the point
of no return. I try again and even though he seems as if he’s going to drop dead at any moment, he scratches until I feel tears in my eyes, my bloody hands trembling with despair.

It is dark, surreally dark, and I’m hanging upside down from the tree. My legs are hooked over a branch and my arms stretched as far as they can go. From upside-down I see the silhouette of the boy, but this time he is on the ground.

“If I fall, will you catch me?” I call out to him.

He doesn’t answer and begins to walk away. I feel myself slip. One leg first, the position so painful that I am perspiring like hell.

“Hey!” I call out again. “Will you catch me?”

He turns around. “Catch yourself, Taylor.”

I can no longer hold on. My scream hurts my own ears. The ground comes quickly and I hit it with a sickening thud.

I avoid the House front. I notice that most of the students have started eating dinner in their rooms.
Probably to avoid me. The common area is empty and silent. News has already hit the streets that I’m losing control of my House and Richard is all ready to take the reins.

I begin to develop a pattern. During the day I hide outside Hannah’s house. The peace I feel here is overwhelming. Monkey Puzzle trees and rose bushes are scattered all around and the result is a mix of scents and colour and sounds of birds flying low and nature in such perfect harmony that it seems wrong that the very person who created it is nowhere to be found.

There’s a point just outside Hannah’s house where the river makes a sand bar. I sit there often and one day I see Jonah Griggs standing on the bank on the other side, against a gum tree. I don’t know what to feel. For a moment it seems like the most natural thing in the world for him to be there, for one of us to call out a hey rather than ignore or accuse each other. The distance between us is no more than twenty metres and neither of us move for what seems like hours. There is a question in his eyes; I can see. That and something more. I can hear the ducks in the distance but no one stirs, except for the finches, which have no idea about the
territory wars and boundaries. They leave my side and make their way over to his, as if to say, “Don’t involve us in this; we’re just enjoying the view.”

At night the Prayer Tree becomes my shrine. I spend most of my time searching the carvings on the trunk while the rest of the world is dead silent, sinister phantoms seemingly absent from their sleeping dreams. Unlike mine. I look for anything. Links, I’d call them. There are phrases that sound like song lyrics and the biblical references are there and as I shine my torch on every single carving, I come across another piece of the puzzle. I find the names. Narnie. Jude. Fitz. Webb. Tate.

All scattered but there. Like they exist, not just in Hannah’s imagination but in real life. A little voice tells me that the Prayer Tree could easily be the inspiration for her story but I know deep down it’s more than that. Worse still, one of them is dead. I know that from the story. And I grieve like I’ve known them all my life. I copy down the song lyrics and back in my room I enter the words in a search engine. I find the bands and the songs and in one there’s a line about Brigadoon and a rain-dirty valley
that reminds me of something in Hannah’s manuscript. I download them all, creating a soundtrack of the past. When I finally hear the song that the boy in the tree in my dreams plays to me, I cry for the first time since being on the train with Jonah Griggs. I wrap myself in the music, curled up in my bed, thinking of Hannah, eyes wide open, forcing myself to keep awake. Unlike Macbeth, who has sleep taken away from him, I take sleep away from myself. And Hannah’s sick pathetic cat sits in the corner, still huddled in its state of fear.