The Beauty Is in the Walking (6 page)

When was the last time I'd been in Mrs Schwartz's office? It hadn't changed, anyway; I recognised the paintings on the walls which were mostly copies of great masterpieces slowing fading behind the glass. The years had seeped under the door to dust their shabbiness over her desk, the bookshelves and the potted palm in the corner that was too green to be real.

We all liked Mrs Schwartz, not because she was the smiley type who tried to brighten up school assemblies with cheerful bullshit, but because she gave every waking hour to us, and we knew it. Mr Lambert was there, too. He'd gone through his version of what happened and then I'd done the same, explaining how I'd ended up on the ground. No one attacked
me
; they had to understand that.

Lambert nodded gravely to confirm my account and Mrs Schwartz seemed relieved that she didn't have to browbeat the truth out of me.

‘Well, Jacob,' she said, looking surprised. ‘I can never condone boys getting into fights, but on this occasion
I have to commend you. You were trying to protect Mahmoud. You're sure you're okay?'

She glanced at the bandage on my elbow, but what she'd really been saying was that I was a skinny-boned cripple who'd been mad to get in the way.

‘Have you ever been in a fight before?' she asked.

I thought of Dan and Mitch and the dickhead from the toilets and wanted to say,
Yeah, I've been in a fight and my side won, too
. I shook my head.

After a brief knock the door opened and Mum was in the room. Judging by the concern on her face, you'd think I was half-dead.

‘Are you all right, Jacob?'

Christ, how many times would I have to answer that one?

Then Mum saw the bandage and the dirt on my clothes and she was beside me, wanting a look at my elbow. ‘Where else are you hurt?'

I turned my arm away so she couldn't take hold. ‘Mum, I'm seventeen,' I said to her, trying not to sound rude in front of the teachers. ‘It's no big deal.'

She backed off and seemed to understand my embarrassment, but she was fired up with mother-stuff and it had to go somewhere. She started in on Mrs Schwartz.

‘I saw a boy waiting outside with his parents, the . . .' She paused, reluctant to describe them because of how it might sound. ‘Is he the one Jacob was fighting with?'

Mrs Schwartz looked towards the door, frowning.
‘Oh, Mahmoud . . . no. He's the one . . . well, perhaps you should hear the whole story.'

So everything was repeated, in Mrs Schwartz's words this time, and that was when I became a hero.

I wanted to cut in and say,
You don't know what you're talking about. I was bloody useless
, but I couldn't backchat the Principal in front of my own mother.

‘Best take Jacob home,' Mrs Schwartz suggested and she made for the door, holding it open as we passed through.

Outside, Mahmoud sat with a man beside him who was surely his father, bearded and black-haired and wearing the uniform of the meatworks. As soon as he saw us, the father was out of his chair and coming at me in rapid, threatening strides.

‘This is one of them, who attacked my son,' he said sharply to Mrs Schwartz. It was a question, really, but the way he said it sounded like he'd come up with his own answer.

I tugged my head down between hunched shoulders and lost my balance in the brief moments before I saw that he'd stopped short. Mum was caught out, too, and almost fell when I grabbed hold of her to keep myself upright.

Then Mahmoud was beside his father, shooting out words like a fire hose in a language I didn't know – Arabic, I suppose. I didn't need a translation to guess what he was saying and soon enough the father had backed off.

‘My son has explained. I'm very sorry,' he said sincerely and, with his face reddened by embarrassment,
he went back to his seat where Mahmoud bent over him, whispering still in their own language.

Mrs Schwartz was saying something to Mum – maybe she spoke to me as well, but I was watching Mahmoud, who turned to face me, as though he'd sensed my eyes on him.

Until our paths had crossed an hour ago he'd been the surly-eyed spy who watched his sister in the school yard in case she talked to guys like me. I hadn't been entirely convinced by what Soraya told me and in the days since I'd squibbed on talking to Dan about it.

Now I was staring straight into Mahmoud's face in that wordless way that communicates at a different level. There was a strength in it I should have expected, I suppose, after he'd taken on the mob so manfully, but strength wasn't the right word. He had something in him I knew from a more familiar face – my brother's – and the connection made me search deeper, into the part of him that would always do the things expected of him, the part that acted by what he believed in. They were the qualities in Tyke that made me want to be like him and they lived in this boy, too.

‘Come on, Jacob. It's time I got you home,' said Mum, tugging at my elbow and since the moment had passed I shuffled off beside her. In the car, there was no school principal to make Mum worry about the niceties. ‘Jacob, what in God's name were you up to? You knew you'd be knocked over. They could have trampled you half to death.' She finished off with something mothers love to
smack you with. ‘And where would I be then, if you were killed in a playground fight?'

‘With no one to watch out for all the time,' I said, not meaning anything by it, but she didn't take it that way.

‘Do you think I care about how much I do for you, how much I worry about you? You are part of my life, and I wouldn't trade your CP for a dozen able-bodied children.'

Jesus, I would.

An hour later, my entire group turned up at home, absolutely stoked.

‘Jacob, you bloody champion. Amy's told us all about it,' said Dan who led the way.

I'd never seen him like this, not about anything
I'd
done. Mitch and he were a tag team and if they didn't quite pat me on the back, the effect was the same. ‘How many of them were there, again?' asked Dan. He wasn't asking me.

‘Seven,' said Amy.

‘Seven with one blow,' cried Mitch, quoting the fairytale Mrs de Marco read us in primary.

‘I only tangled with one. Sort of tackled him, that's all. You're exaggerating.'

They knew it, but it didn't matter because this was my day and they were determined to celebrate it with me. Amy was behind the whole thing, I suspected, and I sent an accusing smirk her way which made her laugh. I hadn't seen her so bright-eyed before, or maybe it was because those eyes had never been focused on me.

‘I saw everything,' she told the others, surely not for the first time, and challenged me to shut her up, while hovering in the background I saw my mother switch between proud grins and a furrowed brow.

The whole thing was blowing up like a balloon and it was fun like I'd never had before, especially when I couldn't buy that sort of connection to Amy with a planet of gold. They were barely gone when Dad turned up – on a Friday! – his drinks-with-his-mates night which usually became a counter meal and a few more beers in front of whatever Fox Sports was dishing up on the pub's big screen. He was all over me like a rash, but at least he cut through the cripple-caution and all Mum's talk of recklessness. ‘Gutsy stuff, Jacob. I'm proud of you.'

I tried to remember if he'd ever said those words to me. His pride in Tyke was naked and boisterous, where with me it was a touch on my shoulder or a hug when I'd been younger. He was a very gentle man for a guy who talked up the footy and car racing and the rest.
You've done well there, Jake
, he'd say about some picture I'd drawn or the way I'd stuck it out through physio, which could be damned painful.

‘Dad, I didn't do much. Mahmoud fought them off himself and then Mr Lambert came. That's it.'

He listened, smiled and behind his eyes I could see he was proud all over again because I was doing exactly what a hero was supposed to do – I was talking the whole thing down.

When Tyke called I almost groaned. Not again, and I'd been hoping to talk with him about other things, but with all this hero crap there'd be no chance to discuss Amy.

‘This is getting embarrassing, Tyke. I'm a bloody fraud,' I told him, once I'd taken the phone to my room and flopped down on my bed. ‘What I did was pathetic, really, and it's not like I was hurt.'

I poured out the full story, then, without false modesty and without hiding the viciousness of what Hattendorf's mob were up to. For the first time, I explained the background, as well, about the rumours that had built up and how they must have broken over the only target those blind idiots could find close at hand.

Tyke didn't interrupt and even when I went quiet he held back from the kind of things Dad had been saying. He took me seriously, that's the thing. God, I missed him.

Finally he spoke, like a judge who'd been nutting out his verdict. ‘You could have gone for help like Amy, but instead you stepped in front of the Muslim kid.'

‘I knew there wasn't time. I was trying to buy some, that's all.'

‘That's exactly what you did, Jake. Sounds to me like you made all the difference. Do you know how long it takes to make a mess of someone? Seconds, that's all. Believe me, I've seen it. He wouldn't have held them off for long, not seven and especially when this Hattendorf character got in on the act. Don't be so down on yourself. You saved him a lot of grief.'

‘There was no one else,' I said.

‘No, and there didn't need to be.'

Wow, those last words blew it open for me and at last I gave way to real pride in what I'd done that day – a legitimate pride, in myself.

I woke on Saturday with sunlight heating my bed and an ache in front of my ear. I was on first shift at Blockbuster, but it was a rare day I didn't check Facebook before leaving home and I was curious to see if Amy had sent me anything to enhance my status as hero.

Holy crap! My page had exploded and none of it was about what I'd done yesterday. Word was out that Mahmoud Rais had been seen near the school the night Charlotte was killed. There was a witness, with a name. Mrs Bagnold. I knew her – everyone did.

That was the start of it. The rest was plain ugly; comment after comment saying they wished Hattendorf's mob had torn Mahmoud apart. Those were the actual words, as though he'd been found guilty in court and the punishment was to mutilate him like those animals.

Shit, shit, shit. Just because he was seen nearby didn't make him the killer. Hadn't these kids ever watched
CSI
or
Law and Order
? I began replying to the avalanche of comments, but even if I'd had all morning, the sheer
number would have beaten me. I gave up after the second one and rode to work beside Mum in the Astra with a cold stone in my gut.

My boss at Blockbuster was Rory, who was fat and didn't care. He was also a funny guy, not in the jolly roly-poly way, but clever-funny. He could quote every put-down line he'd ever seen in a movie and knew just how to slip them into a conversation.

‘Nice tie,' he'd say to any bloke who came in without a shirt on and we had a few of those. That morning he had a surprise for me when he came in about eleven. ‘You asked about
The Truman Show
, right? Well, old man Drakos got out of his coffin long enough to return it,' he announced, holding up the DVD.

I tossed it in my bag, thinking I'd take a look after my shift, but, home again, I logged on straightaway and found messages from Amy, plus more on my phone. All said the same thing: call me.

‘Can you meet me?' she asked. ‘The riverside at Meredith Park.' (You couldn't get away from Mum's family in Palmerston.) She'd thought carefully about where to meet, too, because I could walk to the park without my back aching. When I arrived, she waved to me from a bench in the shade of trees that grew out of the riverbank.

‘Let's go down to the water,' she said when I joined her.

Families came here to swim because it was shallow with lots of sand for buckets and spades, but with so little water in the river we had the wide beach to ourselves.
Sand wasn't my friend; I managed by taking it slow, and when she noticed Amy offered her arm to steady me.

‘We got interrupted on Friday,' she began, once we'd found a spot among the tree roots.

‘By those thugs.'

‘By your heroics,' she said, smiling deliberately to make me blush and I probably did.

‘I wanted to thank you properly for those candles,' and before I knew it she had leaned across and kissed me on the corner of my mouth. She pulled back before I could line up my face with hers and kiss her back. After all, it wasn't a manoeuvre I'd had any experience with.

‘I know what you've been doing since the night we went up to Kibble's paddock. I wasn't sure at first, in the car, like maybe you didn't really mean to hold me like that and get me wondering,' she said. ‘But then you started moving us around to sit where you wanted at the table and pressing your leg against mine. I couldn't be imagining things after that.'

‘Did Bec notice?' I asked.

She shook her head. ‘I never thought of you like the other guys, but you're taller now and your voice has gone deep, like Mitch's. I like your voice and I liked having your arm around me in the car, especially after the stunt Dan and Mitch pulled that night. It was gentle and sort of intimate without getting too excited, if you know what I mean.'

Her turn to blush and she pretended to fiddle with something beside her when I knew there wasn't anything
there. ‘You're different from the other guys and that's good because a lot of boys don't know how to show they care. You notice things about me, like the candles and how scared I was up at Kibble's. You even stopped the whole thing before I went totally mental.'

‘Mitch thought I'd wreck his mum's car.'

‘Would have served him right for doing whatever Dan tells him. It was Dan, don't you reckon? He was enjoying how scared I was, the bastard,' she said with a bitterness that surprised me. ‘Just as well you drove off like that, because nothing was going to stop him. That's what I mean about the guys around here. So immature. None of the boys I've been out with would have gone against their mates the way you did, or bought me the candles or given them to me in such a fun way. They don't know how to treat a girl. They think it's all about . . .'

Amy had been lacing her fingers together in her lap as she spoke, breaking them apart and threading them together again, until she couldn't face the words meant to finish what she was saying and reached for my hand instead. ‘They don't get it, that it's fun to hold hands and talk about stuff, like we're doing now. Do you know what I mean?'

Oh yes, I knew. I daydreamed about the things she was talking about, the closeness and the touching between two people and no one else.

I thought about telling Amy of the restlessness in me lately, thought maybe she felt the same way, wanting something different without being able to say what it
was. I didn't speak up, though, because the restlessness had slipped right out of me while we sat so close on the riverbank.

Amy brought my hand up to her face and let it rest against her cheek. ‘Gentle, see,' she said, deeply pleased with herself. With me, too?

Then, with tears in her eyes, she told me about her last boyfriend, the bloke I'd mentioned to Tyke. I didn't particularly want to hear it, but she needed to tell me, to get the hurt of him out of herself, so I let her go. Poor Amy. If my face went solemn in sympathy she should know it was genuine and seeing one large tear finally break free down her cheek almost had me crying, too.

‘I don't want another boyfriend like that,' she said at last and then she went silent altogether.

After so long with just her speaking, I was caught out and scrambled to get something out there. In the end I just started speaking and hoped the words would come.

‘I want us to be together a bit, just you and me, so I'll know what other presents to give you now that I've ticked candles off the list.'

I remembered something Tyke had said about Courtney. ‘I like listening to you, especially when you tell me things you don't tell anyone else, things just for me.'

I cringed at borrowing so much from my brother, but Amy's face softened and she looked down at her feet drawn up beneath her as though she couldn't look at me. ‘That's beautiful,' she said, still holding my hand and when she turned her face up again for me to see there
was the vulnerability I'd stumbled across in Tyke's face. I
had
made a connection, somehow, and not because of some false bravery that made her think I was more than I really was. Better still, I'd meant every one of those words, making them my truth as much as my brother's.

I relaxed now and didn't worry about saying stupid things that would make her laugh in the wrong way or storm off across the sand because I was a cripple with girl things as much as walking.

‘I've been interested in you for a long time, but it didn't seem right to say anything. I was afraid, I suppose, afraid you would laugh in my face.'

‘I wouldn't do that.'

‘I didn't really think you would, but when you've got the problems that . . .'

I stomped on the rest of those words. ‘I take longer to get places than most people, that's all.' Jokes about my legs came easily when the CP didn't matter anymore. ‘I've never had anyone special, only you in my head and that's not enough anymore. You're in the real world and that's where I want to be.'

When I finally shut up there was something in Amy's face I had never seen before. She was exploring mine as though it was a distant star she had discovered ahead of any other human being. I wondered what she saw and told myself that wasn't for me to know.

It was Amy's turn to speak after I'd taken over so much of the talking. She seemed to know as much, yet she became as hesitant as I'd been at the beginning and
when the silence stretched out all she could do was laugh at how self-conscious she'd become. She leaned in towards me, inviting my arm around her as I'd done in the car. This time I had no fear of her pulling away in complaint, yet the daring thrilled through me.

‘We could do something tonight,' I suggested.

‘I'd love to, but there's a family thing on. Not allowed to miss it.'

We trekked across the sand, hand in hand for a different reason now.

‘Listen,' Amy said as we started up the path towards the park. ‘We should keep this just to ourselves for now, eh? Dan and Mitch would stir the crap out of us if they knew. We can have fun together the way we've been doing. You're good at it.'

I was better at a lot of things, it seemed. ‘Sure,' I said. ‘Just you and me.'