Jasper Jones (36 page)

“Charlie, I know where Laura is.”

***

I slip out of the house in a daze and I trudge beside her, racing through a maze of thoughts. I’m heading into the abyss. I haven’t mentioned a word of what I know, in case she leads me to someplace different. Is
she taking me to Jasper’s glade? She must be. But how big a piece of this puzzle does she hold?

If she knows anything about the clearing, about the tree and the rope, then she must have been there on that night. She must know
something
of what happened, or at least how it ended. And has she been there since? What will she do when she finds Laura’s no longer there? Should I tell her everything now?

Was Eliza Wishart the figure that Jack Lionel couldn’t make out? Was she the one who followed Laura that night?

The town is emptying out. The Sovereign’s sprawl has been reined back inside. The band is still playing. The bonfire behind the Miners’ Hall is a mound of red embers. Stray dogs circle the carcasses of the roasting sheep, waiting for the coals to cool so they can pick at the bones. Most families have retired, but a few have stayed on to see in the new year. We walk quickly up the center of the main street. I hope I don’t see my mother anywhere. The hall is still open, but activity there has slowed. Sure enough, on the front steps someone is getting their burned hand seen to by a nurse.

A few couples are necking down the alley by the hardware store. They must be drunk enough to assume nobody can see them. A large man is throwing up on the edge of the general store’s veranda, leaning on a vertical beam and hacking his guts into a drain. It’s the sarge.

Eliza takes me past the station. We don’t speak, but I know she’s upset. I hope she doesn’t cry again. The longer we walk, the surer I am of our destination.

We’re into the outskirts of town, where it’s still and quiet. We move quickly, stepping in rhythm. I don’t know how, but our hands have linked up again. We reach the broad banks of the Corrigan River, onto the open lawns past the traffic bridge. I’m still trying to think of things to say, but Eliza seems so resolute I feel I shouldn’t interrupt her.

We slip beneath the paperbark trees, which leer and lean, their scabby skins hanging from their limbs. The grass by the river is soft, and little saplings have emerged with the aid of the recent rain. Eliza
bends to uproot a cluster of tiny wildflowers. She fiddles with them in her hands.

And then I see our car.

It’s parked by the water’s edge, under a tree. It’s concealed by shadows, but I still recognize it easily. I stop and squint. Eliza tugs at my hand, willing me on, but then she follows my gaze. I frown. And I say it, absently.

“That’s our car.”

“Really?” Eliza whispers.

I nod and I hold my breath. I’m not sure what to do. After a time, we slowly make our way toward it.

It’s a horrible sense of foreboding. It takes me a moment to join the pieces, and then everything makes sense. I swallow hard. The brick drops further than it’s ever been. I feel like that man from France I read about who had a syndrome that compelled him to swallow coins. When he died, they discovered that his stomach was packed like a purse, and it was so heavy it had slid to his pelvis.

I know precisely what I’m about to see, but I edge closer anyway. Twigs crackle crisply under my feet. And I’m close enough to see two of them in there. On the backseat. The sheen of pale skin, slipping and dipping between the shadows. Close enough now to touch the back window. Close enough to see my mother grappling and gripping a man I don’t recognize. To see them flinch, then freeze at my interruption. To see my mother glaring out the window, her face spreading from pinched anger to wide horror. The scrabble and untangle. I’m numb. I’m watching this unfold right in front of me, but I feel removed from it.

I step back. My mother has awkwardly pulled her dress back on. The man slinks back in the seat. The door yawns open, and I squeeze Eliza’s hand.

“Charlie! What are you doing here? You shouldn’t
be
here! What are you playing at? Did you
follow
me? You shouldn’t be out here! Why aren’t you at home?”

She’s hysterical and aggressive. Yelling a mile a minute and waving her hands. I wonder how she has the gall to be furious. I can smell sour sweat and liquor from the car, and it disgusts me. My mother’s chest is heaving. She’s panicking and she’s upset and she’s drunk. She keeps shrieking her spitfire questions, just filling up this space with her stupid outrage.

The walls might be falling, but I feel calm. I really do. Even when she slams the door and grabs my arms and shakes me free of Eliza Wishart. And I notice that her cotton dress is on backward, and how ugly and old she looks when her makeup is smudged.

She starts to pull me toward the car. Still yelling.

“You’re coming home! You shouldn’t be out here! Come on! Get in the car!”

I rip my hands from her grasp with an ease that surprises me. My shoulders are squared. I take a step back, and I feel the balance between us shift. I look away from her. I am so ashamed. Not only because she’s drunk and barefoot, and not just because I’ve caught her fooling around with some fat old bastard while my dad is sitting at home, but because all of this has unfolded in front of Eliza Wishart. She’s seen it all. I want to cover this scene in a blanket, draw a curtain. I want to push our car into the water.

“No,” I say firmly.

“What did you say?”

“I said no.”

“How dare you! Don’t you talk to me like that, Charles Bucktin. Get in the car! I’m taking you home. You shouldn’t be out here.”

“And neither should you. This”—I point at the backseat of the car—“
this
means I don’t have to do what you say anymore.”

I step forward. I’m not afraid of her.

“Excuse me? Yes you
do
, young man! Now get in the car. I won’t ask you again!”

“No!
You
dug this hole,
you
fill it in. I’m not going with you.”

She’s lost. She can’t win this. She can’t win anything anymore.
She looks vile and unlovely. Ghostly white against the mottled gray of the paperbarks. I hate her. I hate her like poison right now, but I also feel sorry for her. She looks like a child. Scared and lost and unhappy. Even more so when her mouth turns down at the edges and her face folds and she begins to cry. As suddenly as she’d risen, she’s fallen.

“You don’t understand,” she sobs. “Your father doesn’t love me. He never has. You don’t know
any
thing. You don’t know a thing at all.”

She’s right about that. I don’t understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand. My mother shakes her head and sniffs. Her hands go limp at her sides. The man in the car doesn’t move. He just sits there. All of this is so messy and awful.

I have to leave.

“Go home,” I tell her, and I feel powerful saying it. I sound like Jasper Jones. I get a shot of electricity down my spine. “Just go home.”

I turn and I take Eliza’s hand. I weave our fingers tight and I squeeze hard. I’ve been betrayed by both my parents in a single night. And I look her up and down, and then leave my mother standing there, her shoulders slumped and shaking. She calls me back, but there’s no venom. There’s nothing in it anymore. We leave her behind.

I stay quiet as we walk. Distantly, we hear the car cough to a start behind us, fleeing the scene. My mother and her lover. I wonder if she’s going back home to confess to my dad. Probably not.

I must be pressing Eliza’s hand especially hard, because she wriggles it a little.

“You okay, Charlie?”

I sigh and scratch my scalp with my free hand.

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I think so. Maybe. I think it’s all too crazy for me to feel anything either way.”

She nods.

“I think I know how you mean. That was really … 
strange
. Your
mother
. It’s just … I never thought she’d be the … I’m sorry, Charlie,” Eliza says quietly.

And it soothes me. It’s as though she can make everything golden with an apology, even though she’s a world away from fault.

I kick at the gravel.

We reach Lionel’s property. It looks so different. It’s such a desolate plot of land to look at now, whereas it used to throb with threat and portent. I wonder if he is watching us go by.

Jasper and I had left his house as abruptly as we’d entered it. After Jasper milked Lionel of all he had seen that night, he pushed off the wall he’d been leaning on. He’d had enough. He slid his bottom jaw from side to side, took one last look at the top of the piano, then strode out of the house. I followed. Neither of us said goodbye, neither of us looked back. I even felt bad for Jack Lionel, leaving him alone like that in his sad little museum.

I know now we’re headed for the clearing, but that’s where my certainty ends. I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what she has to say, what light she has to shine on this dark mess.

The bush doesn’t slow her down. We follow the same narrow kangaroo tracks. I take note of the same landmarks. My legs are scratched by shrubs and low scrub. I hope that Eliza knows the way better than I do. I file behind her, our hands still loosely linked. I can still smell her from here. I can breathe her in and it takes me over. I could follow that scent forever.

Still, the creaks and whirrs and clicks around me make my skin tighten. I don’t want to be out here. It feels as though I’m inhabited by a teeming metropolis of insects, trailing up and down my limbs and my neck. Burrowing under my skin. And they won’t be shuddered off or shucked away.

Eliza Wishart is taking me to the place her sister was killed. My brick is at its lowest. I’m not sure how much more I can absorb tonight.

Here.

Here it is. The broad spine of that enormous jarrah, standing
monumental and alone. I’m being pulled into its orbit. We pause here. Eliza’s back is to the wattlebush that opens into Jasper’s glade. My head is bowed a little, and I watch her carefully. She opens her thin arms and brushes the musky foliage. I am dead on my feet. Heavier than ever.

“You’ve been here before,” she says plainly. It’s not an accusation. It’s a simple statement.

I nod, but I can’t look her in the eye.

Then Eliza Wishart pushes through the bush and disappears like a ghost. I follow slowly.

It’s always strange to walk into this space. The air is different. Everything is utterly still and timeless.

But it’s strangest tonight, being here with Eliza. Being here without Jasper. It feels like I’m trespassing. It’s so hot and quiet and eerie. It’s emptier without him in it. I get the sensation we’re being watched.

I follow Eliza across the thick lawn to the water. We sit beneath the tree. I’m shaking a little. Directly above me is the space where Laura died. The hole in the world that she fell through. I wonder if Eliza knows that.

We sit in silence for a long time. I’m not sure where to look. The water, Eliza, the glade. There are lies everywhere.

Eventually, Eliza pulls her legs to her chest and rests her chin on her knees. She looks at me.

“We need to tell each other things,” she says.

I nod.

“Do you want to go first?” she asks me.

“No. Not really. If that’s okay with you.”

Eliza seems to nod without moving. Then she removes something from the pocket of her skirt. It’s a folded piece of paper. She turns it over in her fingers.

“What’s that?” I ask quietly.

“A letter.”

“To who?”

“Jasper Jones.”

I frown.

“Is it from you?”

“No.”

The silence settles again. Eliza slowly unfolds the paper, then folds it again.

“It’s from Laura,” she says.

“Did she ask you to give it to him?”

Eliza shakes her head and looks away.

“Did you find it?”

She shrugs, still looking over the dam. We fall silent again. Then I ask tentatively, “What does it say?”

She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even appear to hear. Instead her face seems to glaze over. She tilts her head, and she turns and speaks with that strange accent again.

“You know those days when you get the Mean Reds?”

“The what?”

Eliza looks at me with mild chagrin, like I’m getting something wrong.

“Like the blues,” she says softly.

“Oh,” I say. “So you mean, do I get the blues?”

She lifts a little.

“No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or it’s been raining too much; you’re just sad, is all. The Mean Reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”

“Actually, that sounds exactly like what I’ve had the last few weeks. The Mean Reds.”

“Really?” she asks.

“Really. What about you?”

Eliza stares across the dam again. We sit and we listen to the insects.

Then she turns and looks me straight in the eye. She looks older
in the starlight, her face drawn and furrowed. She stares at me for an uncomfortably long time. I wonder if I should say something. But then she breaks the silence.

“I did it, Charlie.”

“You did what?” I have to hold my arms to stop my hands quivering.

“I killed her. It’s all my fault. I killed Laura.”

***

This is what Eliza tells me.

This is what happened.

And I’ve got to get it out quick, I’ve got to loosen the valve on it and let it go, fizzing and spraying, because it’s too hard, it’s too heavy, it’s too much. I can’t hold on to it for too long because it’ll burn. Do you understand? It’s the knowing. It’s always the knowing that’s the worst. I wish I didn’t have to. I want the stillness back. But I can’t. I can’t ever get it back. So. Thisiswhathappened. See, Eliza, she knew all about Jasper Jones. She knew he was with her sister. She knew they were in love. And she knew they went someplace together at night. From her own window, right next to Laura’s, Eliza could observe Jasper approaching. When he first started coming round, he was cautious. He’d hide in the shadows and wait and move slowly. Toward the end, he got more brazen. He just sidled right up. Tapped on the window. And Eliza could see Laura striding back out with him across their lawn after climbing through her window. It had been happening all year, even on the coldest of Corrigan nights. They’d skip across the frosted grass and leave Eliza behind to wonder and speculate. As the weather warmed, it happened more and more frequently. Recently it got to be almost every night. Eliza always wondered where they went to. She imagined they were going to the river, maybe under the old traffic bridge. She was curious and envious. She longed to follow them, but she knew she shouldn’t. It was all so perfectly romantic to her. Like it was from a book or something. A fairy tale. They always stole away in the dead of night, and Laura always returned just before dawn. The
shire president’s daughter and the town outcast, the dangerous boy all the girls secretly wanted to be with. Sometimes Laura and Jasper embraced tightly before they parted. And he’d wink at her and leave. They seemed to fit so tight and right. But then, near the end of November, as the summer heat crept in, Jasper stopped coming. Eliza wondered if they weren’t going steady anymore. It seemed sad that they weren’t, though a part of her felt guiltily satisfied that Laura no longer possessed something that she couldn’t have. Listen. Thisiswhathappened. Like a geyser. Like a burst dam, I can’t hold it. Because Eliza didn’t know, never knew, that her father, the shire president, she never knew that he visited Laura’s room as well. But he didn’t tap politely. He crept in, drunk. Always drunk. Always discreet. There were no locks. It was all in the letter, see? Long before Jasper Jones came to her window. Since she was a girl. Eliza’s age. Thisiswhathappened. Like a cork from a bottle. A train with no brakes. On that night, when I’d been reading, something was happening. Building and garnering and gathering. Something was
up
. It had been strange in the Wishart house for days. It had been tense and sullen. A sickness had sunk. Trouble was brewing. Eliza tried to stay out of the way, as she always did when the mood was foul. Her mother seemed the same as ever, serenely unaware. Her father was louder and angrier; his threshold was thinner. He reeked of spirits and tobacco all the time now. And Laura, who had retreated from them so much this year, who never ate anymore, who never talked or laughed with her little sister like she used to, she was more sallow and sapped and silent than ever. It was as though she wasn’t even there. A ghost in a haunted house. She only left her bedroom when her chores needed doing. Eliza thought she must have been upset about Jasper Jones, but she couldn’t ask about it like she wanted. Thisiswhathappened. On that night, there’d been a big argument. There had been words in the kitchen which Eliza wasn’t allowed to hear. She’d been sent to her room. She didn’t want to listen anyway. She read on her bed with the cat on her lap. She listened to Ella Fitzgerald and hummed softly. She tried to carve out a little space for
herself, a little vacuum away from the world. And there she stayed. But it wasn’t thick enough. It was too brittle. Because later that evening there was a scuffle in Laura’s room, right next to her, and that’s when Eliza became afraid. Head to the wall, she heard voices, but she couldn’t make out words. She knew it was Laura and her father in there. The argument had flared again. She could sense movement. She could hear odd squeaks and shifts. Sounds that Eliza translated in her mind as two people grappling. But then Laura began shouting, screaming, which was soon muffled into sounds that made Eliza feel ill. Thishadneverhappened. She heard a crack and a yelp. She felt something through the floorboards. Something smashed against their shared wall and rattled onto the ground. And then the door slammed. Hard, loud as a gunshot. Eliza started. The house shook, do you understand? Flakes of plaster fell from the molding around the light fitting on the ceiling and were cast broadly by the sweeping blades of her fan. Like confetti. Like snow. Footsteps, marching. Then the silence was swift, sweeping in like backwash. She wondered if she was allowed out of her room. She figured she didn’t want to go anyway. She was afraid. And where was her mother? Where was she in all this? She heard their car roar to a start, and she opened her curtain to see her father weaving dangerously out of the drive and down the street. Then she could hear Laura crying through the wall that separated them. But still she didn’t leave her little bubble. She stayed. Safe. And she didn’t stir, though she was restless and confused. She thought Laura would wave her away angrily. And the house was quiet for some time. After the neighborhood lights went out, when folks had retired for the night, Eliza heard the familiar scrape of Laura’s window. Up, up, stop. She spilled off her bed and pressed her face to the glass. Laura was leaving, heaving, but she couldn’t see Jasper anywhere. Laura was in her nightdress. She was in a hurry. She was alone. But she was barefoot, so she couldn’t have been going far. Maybe just to the end of the street. Still, something was wrong. Maybe she was sleepwalking. Beckoned by something behind her eyes. Eliza worried. And it was worry that propelled her out into
the hot night, that had her trailing her sister at a safe distance. It was illicit and exciting. She’d never been out this late on her own. Her body was buzzing, her heart was stammering. Things smelled different, felt different. Trees took a ragged shape. Things felt sinister, threatening. Laura was meeting Jasper somewhere, that’s what she figured. But what had just happened in her room? What was the ruckus? Why had she been screaming? What was the argument about? Had her father struck Laura? Is that what she’d heard through the wall? Why had he left so quickly, so angrily? Things had been so horrible recently. She’d tried to ignore it all, but it just welled up and took her over. It loomed until it toppled. Now she had to know. If this excursion revealed nothing, she would interrogate her sister tomorrow. She was going to finally find out. Thisiswhathappened. Eliza skipped lightly to keep up, still with the thrill of being out at night for the first time. Laura was moving fast, bent forward, arms folded. And they walked for what seemed an eternity. Laura didn’t look back once. All the way through town. Past the station, past the thick end of the Corrigan River by the bridge and the picnic grounds. Right out past the old pastoral properties that kick-started Corrigan waybackwhen. Past Mad Jack Lionel’s run-down cottage, which still had its lights on. Eliza shuddered when she realized where she was. She thought seriously about turning back. But she was committed now. More so when they reached the fringe of bush, and when they pressed into the thick of it. She was terrified of losing Laura. She had strayed out of view a number of times, and Eliza had to pause and listen carefully and follow the path with her head bowed. She became annoyed and confused. She was being scratched and rasped by branches and prickles. She regretted her impulse now. Where was she going? Was this where Laura had been going all year? Where was Jasper Jones? Was he at the end of this journey? She didn’t know anything. She felt small and out of her depth, like a child. When Laura paused at the foot of that enormous jarrah and smoothly vanished, Eliza felt a sudden chill. She desperately wanted to go back. But Eliza crept around under the wattle bush and hid in the scrub beneath a bottlebrush. She
peeled back the foliage to reveal that strange little clearing. And she crouched and watched Laura very carefully, stunned by this place. This must be where they had been coming all this time. It seemed so perfect. It was so beautiful and serene. It felt ethereal. A timeless little bubble in the world. A secret garden. Her sister walked toward the smooth gray eucalypt that presided over the small dam on the far side, and she peered into what appeared to be a broad, hollow space at its base. When she emerged, she surveyed the glade, squinting intently. Eliza shrunk into the shadows and held her breath. But Laura turned and slumped and sat by the water with her head on her knees. Eliza longed to go to her, but she knew she’d be in for it if she did. It looked as though Laura was waiting for someone anyway. For Jasper, she assumed. So she’d probably just disappoint her if she crept out from the trees and revealed herself. Thisiswhathappened. Laura got to her feet and started pacing under the tree. She looked distressed. She tugged at her hair. She examined the hollow another couple of times. She came out with something in her hands. Then she sat. And she cried. She hugged her belly and she rocked herself by the water. It was hard for Eliza to watch. She wanted to run out there and put her arm around her. And she wept herself, very quietly, watching all this unfold. She had to bite her fist. She had to look away. She desperately wanted to know what was wrong, but she was trapped by her own indiscretion. It was so hard being outside of this, watching it like a grainy film. Thisiswhathappened. Laura bowed and concentrated over something in her lap. It looked as though she might be writing. Then she stood with her arms folded and her head bowed. Eliza could see her shoulders shaking. And then she watched her move toward the eucalypt. And with a strength and ease that surprised Eliza, her sister made her way up the trunk, shinnying in parts, using footholds and hoists in others. Flakes of bark were peeled off by her bare feet. Her nightdress hung loose. She paused in places, but she seemed to make her way up easily. It never looked precarious. Eliza was quietly impressed. Even so, it seemed perilously high. Eliza wanted her to come down. In any other
circumstance she would have shouted out as much, would have demanded she descend. But Laura sat on a thick bough that reached across the front bank of the water. Eliza thought she might jump in. It looked dangerous. She was uneasy. But Laura looked relaxed up there. Swinging her legs, her hands holding the branch. She sat on the bough for a long time. Eliza’s mind wandered. She adjusted her position, got comfortable. She sat cross-legged, rested her chin on her palm. And she waited. Maybe Jasper was on his way. Maybe Laura just wanted someplace quiet to sit. It made sense. She’d had a horrible time. Maybe she just needed to be somewhere peaceful and nice. Her fortress. Her castle keep. Thisiswhathappened. And it was fast. Too fast. Eliza had no time to think, no time to act. Her mind had drifted elsewhere, was too far removed. She was even a little dozy. She hadn’t noticed the rope wrapped around the branch. She just saw it as a natural irregularity in the wood, some strange bind of bark. And so she was slightly bemused when it was picked and unwound. Not worried. Not horrified. Quickly, quickly. She was still a little detached when the halo fell, do you understand? Thisiswhathappened. Laura, with her back to her sister, her back to the town, her hands to her throat like her father tightening his necktie. And then she rocked back and fell. Eliza remembered being startled when she didn’t hit the ground. It made it so much more sudden, when she locked and jolted and listed and twisted, with a gap between her and the earth. Then silence. White noise. Eliza didn’t scream, she didn’t run. She froze. Everything stopped. Everything ceased to be. Do you understand? It was a mistake. Surely. It hadn’t happened. She’d dreamed it. She’d fallen asleep. She was flinching out of a nightmare. But no. There she was. There she was. No struggle. A heavy bag. Floating. Slowly turning. Until she was still, and then everything rushed inward: Laura was facing Eliza Wishart, who then ran from her hiding space and pulled at her sister until she realized it would do no good. She’d gone. Snuffed like a candle. Laura had just fallen from grace. She’d disappeared. Gulped and swallowed by something enormous and unseen. Eliza panicked. There was something by her
feet. A folded piece of paper. She picked it up. Pocketed it. She didn’t know what to do. She was shaking, like her limbs were not her own. She was about to sob, about to scream, but she heard someone approaching. She gasped. She ran back to where she’d been hiding. Just in time. She had to bite down hard to stop her teeth chattering. She’d never been so afraid. This was all a horrible mistake. She hugged at herself, dug her nails into her ribs, and she waited. She breathed in quivering beats. She was close to breaking down. And then Jasper Jones appeared. He slipped in through the wattlebush. A couple of yellow baubles nestled in his hair. And he stopped. Eliza watched him, she saw the precise moment he understood. And he issued a ragged animal sound, like a groan. Then he ran straight to Laura, trying to hold her up, trying to take her weight, to give her air. But she was gone. No matter how high he tried to hoist her, no matter how much he yelled and appealed in a desperate voice that raised hackles on Eliza’s neck. She watched the messy struggle, breathing a million miles a minute. It was a macabre acrobatic dance. Some horrid gothic circus act. She shuddered. And she would have cried and shrieked and wailed right then and there had Jasper not suddenly recoiled and bolted from the glade. She was alone again. She crept out. She had no choice. She had to follow. She had no other way of getting back. She didn’t know where she was. But she didn’t want to leave her sister. Eliza Wishart took her last look at Laura and quickly burrowed through the wattlebush. But of course Jasper was moving too fast, too fast. He knew the way too well. He burst along the kangaroo tracks and disappeared. Eliza was lost almost immediately. She stumbled and staggered on, tired and alone. She followed the tracks that looked the most worn, hopelessly lost. But it didn’t matter, because of what she’d just seen. Whathadjusthappened. She seemed to be moving deeper into the bush. When Eliza reached the river, a broad vein of something familiar, she was overcome. She dropped to her knees and she wept until she vomited into the stream, and it carried her insides south in ribbons. She cried because she was afraid. It was too early for grief. Too close.