Jasper Jones (35 page)

And then Lionel says, softly: “I know. I was driving.”

***

When I’m back in my room, it feels like the first time I’ve ever walked into it. Nothing feels like home anymore. Even my skin, my clothes, my smell. Everything feels different.

The return journey from Jack Lionel’s house was very strange. We walked fast and purposefully. Across the oval, away from the center of town. We could still hear pulses of music and chatter in the air. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter Eliza Wishart. I might have melted into her arms, I might have told her everything. Jasper and I didn’t say a word to each other. My head was an empty box. Jasper seemed deep in thought. Full of sullen and angry questions. And why wouldn’t he be? His whole world had been lifted and upended like a bag of rubbish.

When he left me by my sleepout, all he said was that he was going home to see his father, who’d arrived back this morning from the gold-fields, but not before pissing away the money he’d earned out there. It’s an encounter I’ll be glad to miss.

I look across at the bundle of pages my own father has left me, like a giant steaming shit on my desk. It’s all too much. Like that first night when this whole mess took me over. And it’s tightened its grip ever since. It’s buckled me. I need to sleep it away. I need to wake up somebody new. I need to leave with Jasper Jones.

We’d gone to confront Mad Jack Lionel about murdering Laura Wishart, only to find that he was driving the car that killed Jasper’s mother. This world isn’t right. It’s small and it’s nasty and it’s lousy with sadness. Under every rock, hidden in every closet, shaken from every tree, it seems there’s something horrible I don’t want to see. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why this town is so content to face in on itself, to keep everything so settled and smooth and serene. And at the moment, I can’t say as I blame them.

***

Jasper didn’t sit down. But he didn’t look Lionel in the eye either, not after the old man presented him with ragged albums full of other photographs and birth certificates, nor after he showed Jasper his father’s old bedroom, which hadn’t been touched or troubled in years. There were still clothes hanging out of the drawers, a guitar and a cricket bat leaning into each other in the corner of the room. Football trophies in a cupboard. I peered at the engravings.
DAVID LIONEL
.

Jack Lionel told Jasper that he’d never wanted him to be born.

Rosie Jones was from a neighboring shire. She and David had met at a dance outside town. They kept seeing each other, secretly, usually down at the Corrigan River, where they could be alone. When she fell pregnant, Jack Lionel railed hard against it. He demanded that they have it dealt with. He said it wasn’t right, that David was dirtying the family name. But David pushed back harder. He told him they were in love, they would keep the child. Furious, Jack Lionel banished his son from the house. David snatched up some belongings and left willingly. His drawers stayed open all those years. He and Rosie rented a place in town, and he secured an apprenticeship at the mine. But they were cast apart. Even David’s mates turned their backs after saying their piece. Eventually, they all left him alone. The only place he was still tolerated was the footy club.

They were married three months before Jasper was born. Just the two of them, attended in a small church in the city. And it was there that David took the opportunity to change his surname to Jones. Jack said that hurt him the most of all.

After Jasper was born, Rosie reached out to Jack. She began inviting him to Sunday dinner every week, which he would routinely turn down. After a full year of cheery requests, he finally relented. He showed up, quiet and tentative, hat in his hand. David pushed past him and went to the pub. But Lionel stayed, and he and Rosie sat and ate.

Jack Lionel learned that he’d been so very wrong about her. She was kind and forthright and beautiful, and she cooked as well as his own wife had ever done. He began turning up every Sunday, spending longer in their house with Jasper and Rosie. David slapped the bar at the Sovereign and stayed out until the bell rang.

Lionel began looking forward to seeing Rosie so much, it became the peak of his week. He dressed sharp and took care and combed his hair. And Rosie, too, began cooking more elaborately and took to wearing her Sunday best. Lionel told Jasper that he came to adore his
mother like a daughter, that the two of them became very fine friends. And it wasn’t just on Sundays. She often dropped in to Jack’s house for afternoon tea with something she’d baked, and he’d unpack the good china cups and saucers. David, of course, stayed away. Rosie held them equally responsible for persisting with their feud: David for being too stubborn to extend his hand, and Jack for being too proud to apologize.

It was on an unseasonably cold April Sunday that Rosie Jones clutched her side and gasped. She insisted she was all right, but when she could no longer stand and could barely breathe, Lionel bundled her into the Hillman and started driving toward the coast. When she started shrieking in the car, Lionel feared the worst. Rosie’s eyes were wild, and she sucked and seethed air like she was leaking it through her lungs. Lionel hurtled down the hill, squinting into the harsh twilight sun. Rosie’s back was bolt straight, and she pitched and pulled in her seat as though she were in a rocking chair. She squeezed at his hand with such urgency that he hadn’t the heart to retract it.

If he’d done so, if he’d possessed that shard of cold common sense that would have seen both his hands gripping the steering wheel, he might have better dealt with the jolt caused by a deep pothole that the sun obscured. But as it was, Jack Lionel braked hard and overcorrected on the gravel roadside. They slid toward a wall of trees. And that’s all it took. Just a hole in the ground, aligned with a tire. An instant in time. A moment of shit luck in bright light and everything turned to black.

When Lionel came to, he was covered in blood and glass and he was trapped inside the car. The passenger seat was empty. There was a thick, sick quiet punctuated only by insects. The windscreen was gone. Before he blacked out again, he caught sight of Rosie’s dress a few meters ahead, and he understood what he’d done with such a heavy dread that he welcomed the creeping dark behind his eyes.

It was her appendix. It was a bubble ready to burst. And so Lionel’s instincts had been right in rushing her toward a doctor. But even so, Lionel never forgave himself. He wished it were him that had died,
not Rosie Jones. And so too did David, who blamed him violently and entirely, who suspected something far more sinister than an urgent race to the hospital. The last words David ever spoke to his father were delivered that night over his bed in the emergency room. He told him that if he showed up at Rosie’s funeral, he’d kill him then and there, God as his witness. And Jack Lionel believed him.

The crash had shattered Jack’s leg, left it aching and useless and bent inward. But Rosie’s death cloaked his whole body. Weighed him down like chain mail. Because he’d come to love her in that short time, and hand in hand with that chill of responsibility was that he simply missed his friend. He missed her cooking and her laugh and her smell and the way she always sat so straight and dignified in her chair, the way she was always so interested in what he had to say. Jack Lionel packed away the china and hung up his suit and never wore it again. Neither his leg nor the rest of him ever healed properly.

He held his own service for Rosie Jones. When the council returned the crushed husk of the Hillman to his property, it was there that he said his piece, by the passenger side of the car. He cried and he prayed, and then, kneeling in the rain, he used the edge of a penny to etch the word he wanted to last longer than he’d be on this earth to keep saying it.

Of course, Corrigan was ruthless. Rumors spread regarding the circumstances that saw Jack Lionel speeding away from town with Rosie Jones. Some said that he’d abducted her. That he’d become infatuated with his son’s wife and had stolen her away, and when she’d fought him in the car, the scuffle had caused them to crash. Others asserted that they’d planned their escape together, and it was their lusty fumblings that had them coming unstuck on the road. There were those that maintained he’d lured her into the car, strapped himself in, and deliberately veered off the road, making her death seem an accident. There were so many competing plots and twists. So many unconfirmed sources and personal accounts and neighborhood testimonies. And they wound around each other so tightly, they seemed destined
to strangle and obscure the real truth. Nobody ever mentioned Rosie’s ruptured side. It seemed consigned to some other history. And the lies and suppositions were just heaped upon the stack. The story became truth. It became stone. And Jack Lionel’s portrait was smudged with ink and smeared in shit, and he made no effort to wipe it clean. And so he became the monster and the killer that they all said he was. A low man, a madman. A pariah. The town turned its back. The church no longer held an interest in his soul. And Jack Lionel, who had always enjoyed the solitude of his property, simply pulled further away. He severed himself from Corrigan. He went to other towns for food and supplies. He lived very simply off his war pension; he grew vegetables and raised sheep and cattle until his leg wouldn’t allow it. In recent years, he’s lived off tinned food and eggs and tea from tin mugs. And the only people he sees from Corrigan are the few children who dare to steal his peaches, and his grandson, who skirted his property for years, taunting his heart.

Jack Lionel always thought Jasper ignored him on purpose as a means of shunning him. Some angry, willful act of ignorance. Not for a moment did he consider that Jasper Jones may not have known the truth.

Lionel expected Jasper Jones to have been poisoned with the lie. Planted by his father and fertilized by the town. And so he desperately wanted to invite him inside, to give him the truth, to scratch that word into the air. But Jasper never stopped, he never once paused to listen. And Lionel, too immobile to rush down to meet him and plead his case, was consigned to yelling from his veranda every time Jasper happened by.

All the while, Jasper Jones had no idea why Lionel kept calling his name. But he’d been singled out his whole life, so he paid no attention. Jack Lionel was just some mad old bastard with nothing to say. But I do wonder how it was that Jasper never found out. It made some sense to me that his father never mentioned the old man, but was Jasper so far removed that nobody, not even the most insensitive of children, ever blurted out what they knew?

Perhaps they didn’t have a clue either. I certainly didn’t. Maybe they were all like me. They just feared the myth of Mad Jack Lionel without properly knowing the nature of the lie that fed into it. But in his living room, watching him smoke and recount his horrible story, it seemed strange that I was ever afraid of him. He looked so small and tired and wretched sitting there, slowly rolling his cigarettes. He just seemed a decent man who’d been beaten.

I couldn’t place Jasper’s face. I watched him warily while he stood and listened. He rubbed at his hair and kicked his feet and sniffed. He looked at the ground, fists opening and closing, but I didn’t get the sense he was moving to strike. I noticed him stealing glances at the photographs on top of the piano. I shrunk back and listened intently.

And I’m not sure why, but when Jasper Jones quietly accepted a cigarette offered by Jack Lionel, at the moment he pressed his lips and sucked at it gratefully, I thought then that he’d abandoned hope of ever discovering who killed Laura Wishart. I thought the game was over. He’d given up.

But then Jack Lionel told us what he’d seen that night.

He recalled the evening easily because it was the night before he’d fallen ill with a virus that kept him weak and bedridden for a fortnight. He’d taken notice of the figure outside because it was unusual to see. He knew who passed his property regularly, he knew the familiar patterns. And so when he recognized that young girl, the one he’d so often seen accompanying Jasper, the one he now knew was Laura Wishart, he took notice, because she was walking past alone. And so he’d waited, assuming that Jasper wouldn’t be far behind her. Perhaps they’d had a row and she was walking defiantly ahead. Or she was meeting him somewhere. But Jasper didn’t show.

Jasper asked if he was sure she was on her own.

Lionel was. But then his brow had creased. And his head tilted. And he told us that although he hadn’t seen Jasper with her, he saw that somebody was following behind.

***

I’m sitting on my bed with elbows on my knees when there’s a soft rapping at my window. I close my eyes and sigh. I don’t even turn. It must have been a quick confrontation. Or maybe his father was out drinking. But I’m not even sure if I want to see Jasper again tonight, I’m so sad and tired.

“Charlie!”

I wheel around, hearing the voice. I flip the slats.

Eliza Wishart has come to my window.

She’s here. At night. It’s really her. I don’t say anything. I just open my mouth and then close it.

“What were you doing with Jasper Jones?” she demands. I pause. I don’t have an answer. She must have followed me to the station. I should have turned around. I wonder how far she trailed us.

“Oh. Nothing, really. He’s just my friend, I guess. I don’t know.”

Eliza tilts her head in a way that suggests that she knows I’m lying.

“Charlie, why didn’t you come back? You said you would. You
promised
. And I waited for you. You said you would come back!”

I have nothing to say. I can’t tell her the truth, and I don’t want to lie anymore.

“I’m sorry,” I offer. “I really am.”

“Charlie, I really need to talk to you.”

“I know.”

“I mean
now
. Can you come out? It’s important.”

I can. I’m reasonably certain my dad didn’t hear me return. But I hesitate because I’m worried about what I might say. What she might ask.

And then Eliza says something that shakes me down more than anything I’ve heard since that first night. She feeds her fingers through the louvres and touches my hand. And she says: