The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (29 page)

I didn’t say anything but there must have been a look of confusion on my face, because he went on.

“Look I know this is hard. But we’ve just got to deal with this. This was just an unlucky accident, but we’ve got to accept it.”

“I do accept it,” I said, looking at my feet.

“Good. That’s good. And we’ve gotta accept the consequences.”

 
He kept walking me away from the house. I turned around then and I saw his dad at the window, watching us.
 

“John, what’s going on?”

We’d reached the trees by then, what John’s dad called the apple orchard.

“Jesse, things have to change now. You know that don’t you?”

“Change how?”

“We can’t see so much of each other for a while. In fact we can’t see each other at all.”
 

“Why?”

“That’s the way it has to be now.” He didn’t look at me.
 

“I don’t understand. Why?”

For a while he just stood there, looking off into the distance. Then he shook his head.

“There’s lots of reasons. Someone could have reported seeing three young guys driving that car. We can’t be those three young guys any more.”

“But no one saw us.”

“The way you were fucking driving, lots of people saw us.”

He meant that as a joke, but I didn’t take it as one. I jumped in, my voice high pitched and angry.
 

“But no one saw us, and anyway, everyone in the village knows we all hang out together. It’s gonna look more weird if we stop.”

“No Jesse. You’re wrong.”

“Why?”

He ignored me. He reached up and pulled an apple off one of the trees, and held it in his bad hand while he twisted the stalk out with the other. “You want one?”

I ignored him back, but he just shrugged then took a bite. Then he looked at me and smiled.
 

“Don’t be angry Jesse. This sets us free. We did something special back there. We smashed the ultimate limit. And we did it perfectly. We can do anything now.” His eyes sparkled for a moment like they always had and for a second it felt like things had always been.
 

“Just we can’t do it together?”

He smiled.
 

“We were never going to do it together. Not for ever.”

My brow furrowed again, but before I could say anything he threw his good arm back and hurled the apple as far as he could down the garden. It burst through the leaves of the trees and I watched it fly out of sight.

“In a way it’s good you came to visit. I’ve got something to tell you. I’m moving to London. I’m going to live with my mum for a while.”

“
What?
Why? You hate London.”
 

“No I don’t.”

“You always said you did.”

“Well… It’s not so bad.” He glanced down at his arm. “I can’t surf for a while anyway.”

“But that’ll get better. You don’t have to move. You don’t have to
go away
.” I could hear how high pitched I had got, how whiney I sounded. In contrast his voice still had the deep calm it always did.
 

“And when it does? What then? We all go back to surfing Town Beach like little kids? Hanging Rock’s gone Jesse. That was the only thing that made this place worthwhile.”

“I don’t understand,” I said after a while.

“Come on Jesse. You understand. Maybe Darren wouldn’t, but you do. You get this.”

“I don’t.” I felt the panic welling up again. “What else is there?”

“What else is there but some shitty little village in Wales?”

I stayed quiet while he went on.

“I’m gonna start working for my dad. In his property business. I always was, you knew that.”

“No I didn’t”

“Jesse…,” he started, but he wasn’t about to start arguing with me.

“But what about surfing?” I asked. “You can’t surf in London.”

A look passed over his face. Something like irritation. Boredom. Then his focus shifted off me and was on the horizon, you could see how his pupils contracted.

“Did you really not feel it at all?”

Now I was just confused. “Feel what?” I said.

He looked at me again, and this time he smiled, a deep, broad smile - we called it his superhero smile cos when he did it he looked like the guy who played Superman in those old films. “The thrill. Bigger and better than anything before.”
 

“Thrill?”

“You know. When it happened. Driving that guy’s car when he was lying there cold and still. Burying the fucker under tons of rocks. Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you get anything from that?”

 
We’d stopped by now and he was facing me. I tried to look away from his eyes but I couldn’t.

“Didn’t you like it just a little bit?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

“Come on Jesse, you can admit it. It’s only me and you here.” Those blue dancing eyes bore into me until I had to look away.
 

“I got sick and scared is what I got,” I said.

His face changed into an expression of mock sadness, then he laughed. “Liar,” he said when he finally stopped.
 

“Come on.” Then I found him turning me around with his plaster cast on my back, and we walked in silence for a while until we arrived at his front gate. I realised he didn’t plan on going any further.

“So that’s it? I mean you’re just going? Just like that? You’re just going to leave me?”

He looked at me again and the light was gone from his eyes this time. They were cold and dark.

“Don’t be like this Jesse.”

“Like what?” The anger I’d bottled up over the week suddenly burst out again.
 

“
Are you for real?
You fucked everything up and now you’re just gonna leave us here?”

“It’s not forever Jesse. We just can’t be those three guys for a while. Trust me.”
 

“So how long’s a while? How long’s a while John?”

But he didn’t answer, instead he swung the gate shut.

“How long’s a while?” I said again. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but maybe he saw that I wouldn’t have left. I’d just have stayed there, screaming the same question over and over.

“When the time’s right I’ll call for you. Just keep your head down and your mouth shut.” He backed away from the gate, then raised his good hand and held his whole arm straight, pointing right at me.
 

“I know I can trust you Jesse,” he said. “Don’t let me down.”

thirty-seven

I DIDN’T SEE, nor hear, from John again in six years. I picked up rumours of course, especially early on, that he’d joined another school in London, that he took his exams early and started working for his dad. But after a while even the rumours stopped. So it was a surprise when John came up again. Even more so because I read it in the papers.
 

Things had moved on a bit here of course. I didn’t do too well at school after what happened at Hanging Rock, so I was working full time at the campsite by then. I still hung out with Darren and he was working too, fixing engines or something at the garage in the village. We’d stopped missing John by then, at least, we’d stopped wondering about him, and talking about him. But we still felt his absence. Every night that we just sat about reading surf magazines in the caravan. Every weekend when we waited in vain for something exciting to happen.
 

It was Mum who saw it, a small photograph in one of those magazines you get free with the Sunday papers. There was an article about the actress, Sienna Rowlands - this was before the tits-out photo-spreads in the lad’s mags, she was known then for doing those films about the teenage detective - anyway the magazine talked about how she was dating a mysterious, handsome young man. It printed a photo, and Mum showed it to me since it looked a lot like John.
 

The photo was taken in the street, outside ‘her London home’. The couple were holding hands and she was looking towards a shop window, so you couldn’t even see who she was. But he was looking straight towards the camera. His clothes were different. He looked like one of those fashion victims we used to laugh about, with expensive jeans and a surfer t-shirt. His hair had grown long and was styled into a blond wave. We always had this thing about hair. If there was ever anything on TV or a movie about surfers they’d always have long blond hair, but real surfers never did. The thing was long hair would get in your eyes, and it would take ages to dry once you got out the water, and the salt would make it go all crusty. So we’d always kept our hair short. But there John was looking every inch the fake surfer.
 

But apart from that it was clearly John, the same square jawline, those same clear blue eyes. And whether he’d worked on the look or not, he did look like a film star’s boyfriend, whoever wrote the article thought so anyway. They tried to get Sienna to talk about him but she refused. She wouldn’t even say what his name was. The article wrote it up like this: “
Sienna giggles coyly when asked about her new, and completely gorgeous, beau - but all she will say is they’ve been together a few months and they’re very happy. Lucky Girl..!
”

It felt weird as hell, seeing him in that photograph and I thought about it the whole afternoon. I was serving in the shop but it wasn’t camping weather, so we weren’t busy. I don’t think a single person came in, so I just sat there, wondering what his life was like. How he might have met that girl from the
Teenage Detective
films. And what they might be doing, right at that moment, when I was surrounded by boxes of cornflakes and buckets and spades. I was still thinking about it later too, when Darren came round after work. We sat in the caravan drinking beers and not talking, just like we’d done the night before. And the night before that.
 

Maybe that’s why I got a bit obsessed with searching for more information on what John was up to these days. I didn’t have much else to do.
 

 
We still sold magazines and newspapers in the campsite shop, so it was easy enough for me to scan through them every day. I’d make a pile and work my way through them, ignoring the news pages and going straight to the gossip parts, I was looking for anything I could find on Sienna Rowlands. Mostly there wasn’t anything, but every now and then she’d get a mention, or a photo. She’d be outside a nightclub, getting out of a taxi in a little dress and high heels, or with her arm around someone else who was famous. I soon learnt Sienna wasn’t the sort of girl to miss out if there was a party happening anywhere in London. And she seemed to be linked in some way to nearly every film that was coming out. Everything I found I cut out and kept in a box under my bed. I hid it because I didn’t want Mum to get the wrong idea. After all Sienna did have her tits on show in most of the photos.
 

This way I managed to piece together a few details about John. It was
The Sun
which first found out a name for ‘
Sienna’s Fella
’ - that’s what they had been calling him. What they wrote about him didn’t make much sense though. It said he was the son of a property developer but it also made him out to be some sort of business genius or something. It talked about how much his company had grown since he’d taken over, as if that was all down to John, when really he’d just been given it all from his dad. And whoever wrote it was another one more obsessed with his looks and that long blond hair than checking their facts. A few weeks after his name was out there Sienna did a full interview where she ‘revealed all’ about how they met, at a party somewhere, and how much in love they were. She moaned that he was always working but she said he made it up to her by taking her away to all these tropical places and teaching her to surf.
 

My box of cuttings grew quite a bit when her next film came out. It was some arty thing where she had her kit off more than she had it on. I watched it a couple of times but I couldn’t understand it. But some people must have liked it since she got some award. I saw John in the background when they gave it out in some big ceremony somewhere. He was sitting at a table in this flash dinner jacket and people were clapping and patting him on the back like he’d done something clever.
 

For some reason I never told Darren, but he found out soon enough anyway. I remember it was raining hard. Darren came into the caravan soaking wet. He’d come straight from work, but he didn’t have his normal bag from the takeaway and the off license. Instead he just had this magazine. And he was upset, you could always tell with him. He didn’t even sit down, he just thrust this magazine under my nose.

“You seen this?”

I didn’t say anything but took the magazine from him. It was one of those hundred-most-beautiful women features you get in mens’ magazines. I looked at Darren and shrugged, and he just said:

“Go on, read it.”

So I scanned through the women in their underwear and swimsuits. It didn’t take me long to find her, a new entry in at number thirty six. The way she looked in the picture I’d have put her a little higher than that.

“This?”

“Read it,” Darren said.

“I just have.”

“No
read
it.” Darren wasn’t great with reading and writing. So I read it out loud.

“Sienna Rowlands: The hotter-than-hot actress from the
Teenage Detective
series and now star of arthouse sensation
The Black Hole.
Sienna is also developing a career as a model and it’s easy to see why with such fine attributes. But before you get too excited, Sienna is in a serious relationship with multi millionaire businessman John Buckingham.”
 

“That’s John.”

“I know.”

“They said so at work. Dan was talking about the girl who was in
Teenage Detective,
that she was going out with someone from round here, and Lloyd said he didn’t believe him, so Dan brought this in to prove it and he showed it to Lloyd… And that John they’re talking about, that’s John. That’s
our
John.”