The Beauty Is in the Walking (12 page)

So that made two ‘accidents'. I wondered if he'd pushed me on the stairs, as well.

‘Piss off,' I told him, wishing I could cram as much scorn into mere words as Chloe.

When she stooped, eager to help, I waved her away as politely as I could. ‘Nothing damaged. I'll get up on my own,' and thankfully she backed off.

The boy was still standing over me, though, making no effort to hide the smirk I'd seen once before and instead he bent low so Chloe couldn't hear him and whispered, ‘No more bodyguards, eh?' and, satisfied with this odd warning, he sauntered off.

Biology was never my favourite subject and on Monday afternoon I was simply relieved to have it out of the way.

‘Wasn't too bad,' I told Mum when she asked.

I'd walked into town after the exam, stopping at Blockbuster to get the film Chloe mentioned, then waited for Mum at Merediths.

She noticed the grassy smear on the ball of my shoulder.

‘I had a fall. Lost my balance.'

‘That's twice recently,' she remarked.

‘Yeah, tell me about it,' I said, exaggerating my tone to cover what I was really thinking.

No more bodyguards.

The piss-tough bully had sneered at me too deliberately and with too much confidence in his own immunity for my fall to be a random case of wrong place, wrong time. I just didn't want to join the dots to where it was pointing. Could I even ask Mitch about it? I hadn't spoken to him since last time at the picnic table, but if I
was being honest, we hadn't talked the way we used to all year. He was Dan's mate now, more than mine.

A Svenson word came to me while I waited for Mum. Exposed.

That night Dad came straight home from work, had a beer on the back porch while Mum made dinner and then sat in his old place to form the horseshoe around our dining table. I don't think we'd sat together as a family since last time Tyke was home and Mum seemed to appreciate it, laughing loudly at the weird things customers asked for at Merediths.

‘Front counter will be part of your job next year,' she reminded me.

‘Actually, I want to talk to you about that,' I said. ‘I've been thinking maybe I'll go to uni instead . . .'

Judging by the looks I got, you'd think I wanted to train as a serial killer!

‘That's if I get the marks,' I added quickly, to take the edge off the moment.

Dad stopped eating and stared at me while Mum put down her knife and folk altogether. ‘Next year's already worked out for you, Jacob,' she said.

‘Yeah, but I've had a chance to think about it lately and . . .'

I'd made up a little speech that borrowed a lot from Chloe, not that it would matter as long as I meant what I said, but faced with their blank expressions my words scattered like mice. All I could manage was, ‘It's my future
and I want to talk it all over with you before anything gets decided.'

Mum and Dad glanced at one another, then they focused on me. ‘We've talked about the job at Merediths all year, Jacob, and you've never said anything before,' Mum complained, as though I was trying to wriggle out of a deal.

‘Back when you were setting it up, I hadn't thought about going to uni,' I said. ‘Now I
have
thought about it and I want to change the plan. Svenson thinks I can handle uni, no problem . . .'

Big mistake. Didn't I know that guy's name was poison in this house?

‘Mr Svenson hasn't got a clue what you can handle and what you can't,' Mum snapped at me. ‘He sees you a few times a week.'

The rest of what she meant didn't need to be spoken – that she'd cared for me every moment since I was born, which made her the one who knew what I could do and what I couldn't.

Mum picked up her fork and started bullying things around her plate until she stabbed at a potato. She wasn't the only one who wanted to stab something. I deserved a say in what I could do, but Mum had swatted away my suggestion like a fly.

I retreated to my room after dinner and lay on my bed, corpse-like, while all the things I should have said played loudly in my mind, until the exam timetable taped to the back of my door goaded me towards the desk.
I wasn't a natural studier, let's be honest about that, but Svenson had warned us all how fourth term would decide who got into uni and who didn't. I ripped into the books as a way of getting back at Mum.

For an hour my concentration held out against a voice that said study was a pathetic way to fight back. What use was it when the other side didn't even know I was on the battlefield? If I wanted to change anything I had to go toe to toe, persuade them, win the argument at the dinner table, not my desk. I wanted to win that argument more than I wanted to go to uni!

Once I gave way to that sneering voice, nothing else would stay in my head. I sat back, ready to throw the maths book at the wall, and when I didn't actually do it I felt doubly ashamed at my cowardice. I needed something to take my mind off the whole mess and reached for my laptop, hoping some new comments had turned up on Mahmoud's page. While the laptop was firing up, though, I had a better idea –
To Kill a Mockingbird
lay in the gaping mouth of my school bag. I'd watch the first half-hour and see what this Atticus guy was like.

There was a disc already in the drive.
The Truman Show
. I took it out – then dropped it back into place. Maybe this was better. I was worried I'd end up watching all of Chloe's movie instead of getting back to the books, while Amy's – I thought of it as Amy's, anyway – was halfway through.

Okay, so there was Jim Carrey playing smiley, good-guy Truman, prisoner in a little town that seemed more
like Palmerston the longer I watched. I understood now why Tyke had talked about stars being painted on the inside of a huge dome, because that was Truman's sky. His life wasn't even his own.

I remembered something I'd said to Chloe after Soraya had asked for my help.
I can't think of anything worse than having your whole life mapped out by your parents. No way I'd put up with that
.

I'd been talking about Soraya Rais, but maybe I should have taken a look in the mirror.

To say that I didn't sleep well doesn't quite describe my night. There were no dreams of myself as Jim Carrey's Truman – dreams are never so straightforward. My problem was the conscious thoughts that hauled me back each time I drifted close to sleep. These were mostly replays of the passive way I'd sat at the dinner table letting Mum and Dad set me aside like a piece of boiled pumpkin they couldn't be bothered with. I lay there remembering other times I'd simply accepted what they wanted; in fact, the only time I'd stood up to them was over Mahmoud Rais. If I could do that for a kid who wasn't even a friend, why couldn't I do it for myself?

On my exam schedule, Tuesday was blank, which meant a day at home. I lay in bed, listening to Mum and Dad get ready for work and wondering how well I'd be able to use the hours to study if the voice in my head tormented me in daylight just as savagely as it did in darkness. I had to get back in the game.

I dressed quickly and made my way along the hall only to see Dad ruffling the fur of Mindy's neck on his way out the door.

Maybe it was better this way; I'd work on them one at a time.

I said my own good morning to Mindy then sat in my usual spot at the table, waiting until the sound of Dad's car had died away. ‘Mum, I spent a lot of time thinking last night and I just don't accept it. Next year's not decided yet, no matter what you and Dad have worked out.'

She had been moving back to the sink when I started speaking and heard the rest with her back to me. Now she turned and came forwards to her chair. Instead of sitting, she remained behind it with her hands resting on top. She often kept a tea towel draped over her shoulder while she was busy in the kitchen and that morning it was an old one, I noticed, bought on a trip to Sydney to see a specialist about my heel cord operation. I did the sums in my head; that was seven years ago.

‘Yesterday I checked out a whole bunch of websites with . . .' I was about to mention Chloe, but let the name die unspoken. ‘There's so much interesting stuff you can study, exciting courses . . .'

‘Such as what?' she challenged me.

Mum had every right to expect an answer, yet she'd stumped me with three words. I had been excited going through those websites with Chloe, but no course or career had especially grabbed me. The only one that came to mind was Law, because Chloe had suggested it.

Damn. Maybe I should have watched
To Kill a Mockingbird
after all. Would I like being a lawyer? The word was on the tip of my tongue when I pulled it back. I'd be a fraud tossing out an idea that wasn't mine, but my hesitation was becoming uncomfortable.

‘All that looking at websites yesterday and you can't offer a single suggestion,' said Mum, still waiting.

And I still didn't have an answer. When Mum saw this she moved more forcefully into the gap.

‘Svenson has filled your head with airy-fairy dreams when you don't even know what's out there.'

I thought of Truman. He'd wanted something before he knew what it was, before he could explain to himself, even. That was me. It didn't matter what I did at uni, it was getting there in the first place.

‘I can decide on a course later. I just want to be down in Brisbane and see how I like it. I could stay with Tyke. '

Mum's face took on an expression I couldn't read. There was hurt and something more that seemed like fear, though not the fear people show when they're threatened with a fist; this was something I couldn't name. It disappeared before I could work out what had frightened her and in its place came anger. She snatched the tea towel from her shoulder and threw it onto the table. Close to shouting, she said, ‘This is not what we agreed. You're not leaving so young, the way Tyke did. You're staying here with me.'

I'd expected her to rave on about my CP and how I couldn't manage on my own when people weren't so
ready to make allowances for me. But no. Not a word in that direction.

She'd remained on her feet through all this, giving her the advantage that height brings. I thought about rising out of my chair so my recent growth would even things up, then worried that once on my feet I'd end up marching out of the kitchen. If I did, it would be back to my room in defeat, like last night, and this time I wasn't going to lose.

Mindy stirred under my feet and her warm touch put words on my tongue. ‘Am I your son or a pet to keep you company? A bloody dog!' I shouted, as loudly as she had at me, pointing down at Mindy who cowered at the way her masters were arguing.

Mum's eyes widened and she sucked in a sharp breath. For a moment I thought she'd throw more than a tea towel at me. Instead she put the back of her hand to her mouth and stormed off down the hall.

Mum left for work without another word to me. I worried that this would replace my self-disgust as a distraction from study, but it didn't work out that way. I felt good, in fact, as though a bit of full-on fury had opened up the pipes. It helped that doing well in the exams had become even more a defiance of my mother than it was last night. I had more purpose now that my hopes for uni had morphed into wanting to try things out for myself.

By lunchtime I was fried. The tossing and turning of last night had caught up with me and I slept for an hour. Even when I woke, I couldn't face the books. With hands behind my head and only the fly specks on the ceiling to look at, I thought about
The Truman Show
. For months I'd been restless in a way I couldn't name, no matter how hard I played Svenson's game, and now, without any effort at all, I had a word for what I wanted. Escape.

There, in my room after my eyes opened, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my need for it, as though I
couldn't bear this house or Palmerston, for that matter, for another minute. I walked to the highway at the end of the street and dangled my thumb. I wasn't planning anything dramatic – just a ride out of town with whoever came by and, once I'd tasted the freedom that brought, I'd hitch back in.

Kyle Henry's father picked me up. ‘I just dropped Kyle at the school for his Chemistry exam.'

‘I didn't take Chemistry,' I told him.

‘Me neither. Never went past Year Ten, meself.'

I liked Mr Henry. He'd been on the shire council when Mum was first elected and even when he stood down he kept busy helping whoever needed a hand.

‘Where are you heading to?' he asked.

‘Up the road a bit. I'll show you where.' Actually, I didn't have a clue.

He shrugged at this and kept his battered flatbed at a hundred while I quickly scrolled through the route ahead of us in my head. The last time I'd been on this road I had my arm around Amy and maybe that was why I said, ‘There's a turn-off to the Kibble place, the old road.'

He nodded. ‘You're heading up to where that horse was killed, is that it? Kyle says you've got a special interest in that terrible business.'

‘Sort of. Yeah, I'm going for another look.'

I wasn't seriously going that far. It was three kilometres from the highway and uphill, too.

Mr Henry seemed to have the same thought and after he took his foot off the pedal to slow down he said, ‘It's
still a fair way.' Without making a big thing out of it, he glanced at my legs.

‘I'll manage.'

‘What if I drop you up there?'

It had all been a story to cover my urge to get out of town, but when he made such a generous offer, I thought, why not?

‘You're a champion, Mr Henry,' I told him and he laughed.

Ten minutes later I waved him off with a final thanks and bent myself cautiously through the barbed wire. Police tape fluttered with excitement as I shuffled the last few metres up the slope – finally, someone to warn off.

All trace of the horse was gone and crawling around on hands and knees wasn't going to turn up any clues. That wasn't why I'd come. I hadn't planned to come at all, but, since I was here, I wanted to get a sense of this place in a way I hadn't on the night Amy had been so scared. I didn't believe in ghouls, but lately I'd had demons clawing at me in crannies I couldn't get at, things I hadn't had to face before the Palmerston Case became a headline.

There was nothing for me here, though. The key to all my restlessness lay at my back. I turned around to stare at the town not so many kilometres away across the treetops and smiled to myself when there was no dome arching over it, as there had been for Truman.

I sat on the grass and thought about Amy. This was where things had started for the two of us as a secret pair.
She liked to surprise me with little kisses, but I hadn't actually kissed her yet, not as the kisser rather than the kissee. A few weeks back I'd teased Tyke that he was in love. If he were here now he might turn the tables on me. Nice feeling. I snapped a selfie just to check the look on my face.

A glance at my watch brought a surprise. I'd been here an hour and in that time not a single car had used the road below me. Maybe I shouldn't have let Kyle's father drive me so far from the highway.

There was a signal on my phone, but Mum wouldn't come until she'd finished work and she'd chuck a mental when she found out where I was. Dad, maybe? No, stuff it. I was sick of asking others to do things for me. It didn't look so far back to Palmerston if I cut straight across the paddocks. I set off downhill, feeling good, the way I had after my argument with Mum this morning. This was part of fighting back, taking risks, searching for a breach in the wall.

After twenty minutes the familiar switchblade had worked its way into my back, the one that enters near the bottom rib and digs north to where the shoulderblade meets up with the spine. What worried me more than the pain was how little I'd dented the distance. The straight line I'd imagined wasn't easy to follow, either, and I'd chewed through another hour before I reached the river.

Tyke had brought me to this part of the river, once I was old enough. For Palmerston kids, swimming here meant you'd graduated into the older group. Families
stayed a kilometre upstream in the shallow, sandy stretches where little kids were safe and everyone was on their best behaviour – all the reasons to go somewhere else and swing on ropes and cram seven squirming bodies onto a giant inner tube.

All those visits with Tyke meant I knew where to cross, if my body didn't seize up like a rusty robot before I found it. I stayed high above the bank until I spotted the narrow path down through the trees and then used the thin trunks to hold myself steady on the slope. I wasn't doing too badly until the steepest part where, just my luck, the path took a dogleg. I'd let go of one tree, with the next picked out and my hands extending for it, when my leg gave way.

I went down like tall timber and skidded into the mulga with arms out in front of me to keep the twigs and crap out of my face. My wrist was still tender, but no damage. I worked my legs around to sit up and heard a familiar rustling, not lizards or anything alive, but a plastic bag, the kind supermarkets use by the million. Someone had tossed it aside, I supposed, and if the contents hadn't spilled out I wouldn't have taken any more notice. But they had, enough to make me reach for a stick and poke around until I was sure. It was mushed apple darkened by decay. The skin was the clincher, leathery brown mostly, but with some last tinges of green still visible. I knew instantly what I'd found.

I'd seen too many crime shows, maybe, but I took hold of the stick again and used it to lift the bag by its handles
until it was free of the fallen leaves. I'd have to make sure it didn't brush against me all the way into town.

Crossing the river worried me in a way it hadn't before. Not that I cared about getting wet; the bag was the thing.

By now a blowtorch was enjoying itself on my back, and my legs and hips wanted to know what the hell was going on. When I finally walked free of the bush onto the first real street my right leg was cramping so badly I had to stop after every step, knowing the next was an invitation to pain. I was fighting tears, which was pathetic, but it wasn't the spears of flame jabbed into my spine, simply the frustration that the streets ahead were so relentlessly long and my legs so damned useless.

Just to the corner, I promised myself, then you can give up, call Dad, hope he's done for the day. It was a trick, a way to make myself move, because there was another corner after that and then another as I could see well enough thanks to Palmerston's grid of streets. No way was I calling one of my parents, not after what I'd found.

Luck smiled on me at last when a man I didn't even know stopped to offer a lift.

‘I can drop you home if you like,' he said.

‘Actually, Meredith Street would suit me better, the police station end.'

The cops weren't pleased to see me and I didn't give a fig.

‘What's with the bag?' asked the young constable at the desk.

‘I found something. Those detectives need to see it.'

I didn't mention Kibble's horse, but he knew. Gave me a skeptical look. ‘Better be good, son,' he sighed.

Son! He was only five years older than me. He disappeared out the back and moments later Dunstan appeared through a side door.

I have to be fair to the bastard. He didn't tell me to piss off, much as his face showed he wanted to, and after I'd told him the whole story he took the bag from me, using the stick to hold it. He turned his pen into a second ‘stick' and opened the bag enough to see inside.

‘Have you handled this?' he asked.

‘Maybe a touch when I fell.'

His detective eyes had already checked me over and seen the smear of dirt on my shirt.

‘You were at Kibble's place?'

‘I didn't cross the tape and I didn't go there to play detective, either. Just had to get out of town for a few hours. Finding that was an accident,' I said, pointing at the bag.

‘You think this belonged to the horse's killer? Is that what you're saying?'

No point denying it. ‘Yes. The killer fed apples to Mr Kibble's horse, didn't he? Granny Smiths it said in the paper. Those have been in that bag for quite a while. If he slipped on the way back to town, like I did, he could have lost the bag in the dark and just kept going.'

I was into ‘could haves' and ‘mights'. But there was an important point to all this and Dunstan was an out-of-towner.
I didn't want him to miss it. ‘Only someone who grew up in Palmerston would know where to cross the river. I found that bag next to a path near the stepping stones.'

‘I'm not happy with you going up to Kibble's on your own,' he said. ‘But you did the right thing bringing this bag to us.'

And that was it. I was out on the street again before I quite knew it. The intense concentration of my face-off with Dunstan had pushed my aches into the background for those few minutes, but, now the job was done, they flooded back and didn't they let me know how hard they were going to party. That bag had better be worth it, I raged silently.

I headed back to Merediths where Mum nodded at me soberly. ‘Won't be long, Jake,' she said, her first words to me since shouting down my future this morning. ‘I thought you were staying home all day.'

A shrug avoided lying and while I waited for Mum an empty chair near the door became my new best friend.

Sitting, lying, keeping still was no problem, but movement was torture, something I discovered when I tried to get out of bed the next morning. I took a while to wake up in the first place and if Mum hadn't come in a third time to dig me out I might have been late for the Maths exam. Getting dressed was agony.

‘You wouldn't be able to massage my back before we go, would you? It's really sore.'

She took a long look at me and saw how awkwardly I moved, prompting a familiar sympathy in her eyes. On another day, fine, but a glance at her watch killed off any hope for this morning. ‘There's isn't time,' she snapped, reaching for her handbag.

On the way out to the car she checked me out again. ‘Did you have another fall yesterday?'

‘No, I slept in a bad position, that's all.'

‘I'll massage your back after the exam.'

I was already counting the minutes.

The Maths paper was just what we'd been told it would be and I emerged into the midday heat pretty pleased with how I'd gone. Then Amy was at my side.

‘Hey, is it true?' she asked urgently.

My head was still wrapped around Maths problems and I must have stared at her blankly. She barely noticed.

‘They're saying you've been to the police again, that you found something.'

‘I found some rotting apples.'

I told her how I'd hitched out to Kibble's paddock and what the apples meant for Mahmoud.

‘Oh my God. That's fantastic.'

When we rounded B Block, she spotted a gang heading for the gate. ‘They're probably going into town. You want to join them?'

No sign of Mitch or Dan among them. I knew Amy spoke to Bec every day and she'd mentioned the guys a few times as though she still saw them. I was the one on the outer.

‘Mum's waiting for me. You want to come home to my place, instead?'

‘Why not,' said Amy, brushing her shoulder against mine in a way that no one would know was deliberate.

Mum was waiting, as she'd promised, but she wasn't in the Astra and she wasn't alone. I turned to Amy. ‘You'd better stay here while I see what this is about.' But I already knew.

Mum was standing beside a dusty Commodore and, as I made my way across the road, Dunstan and his partner lumbered out of the front seats.

‘You know these policemen, I think,' Mum said pointedly, when I joined them in the shade of a peppercorn tree. Dunstan's partner was the same hulking shape and for a moment I glimpsed how intimidated people must be when they're arrested by a couple of guys like these. They asked me to recount my little adventure and while I explained the storm cloud grew darker on Mum's face.

‘Seems you're right about the bag you brought in yesterday,' said Dunstan finally.

‘They were the same apples?' I asked eagerly.

‘Granny Smiths, like you said. There was something else in the bag you didn't see. Sugar cubes,' said Dunstan. ‘Kibble's horse had undissolved sugar in its throat when it died.'

The importance of what I'd done hit me with a slap. I hadn't set out to find anything significant and I'd only been guessing, no matter how confident I'd tried to sound at the station. I'd been playing a game where the prize
was to be taken seriously and it was certainly serious now. Minutes later Mum and I were in the back seat of the police car while it bumped and scraped its way as close to the river as the cops could manage, then it was on foot to where I'd found the bag, the two men helping me up the slope like a ragdoll.