The Beauty Is in the Walking (15 page)

We talked about Schoolies and how it would have already started by this time next week. She used the
words,
I can't believe
. . . three times in a minute as though her easy way of speaking had become bogged down in safe clichés. I saw then that she was still stressed about Friday. I didn't mentioned Mahmoud because that linked into her fears, and I'd come with happier ideas in mind.

I moved to the bed and took her hand. When I reached up to stroke some loose strands of hair behind her ear, she closed her eyes to welcome the sensation, then rested her head on my shoulder. I slipped my arm around her and leaned closer, until her head was nuzzled against my neck.

‘This is nice,' she whispered and, lifting her head, she pecked me on the cheek.

I hadn't come for pecks on the cheek. This was the moment. ‘Amy, I've been thinking about us and it's time other people knew we're together. No more keeping it to ourselves, okay. I want to be able to say you're my girlfriend.'

She stiffened and although her face was hidden below my chin I knew it had gone serious in the way I'd been trying to avoid. ‘I'm not so sure, Jacob.'

‘Amy, I've shown how much I . . . how much I care about you.' ‘Love' was an awkward word and I'd told myself to leave it out, yet there weren't a lot of words I could use instead. ‘What I said about the stars is true – I think about you all the time,' I told her. ‘Even in the exams on Thursday, you kept sneaking in and I had to chase you away off the table.' I made a show of shooing
imaginary fairies off my knee. ‘The teachers thought I was pulling some trick, a new kind of cheat.'

That earned a laugh from Amy, at least.

All those words tumbling out of me so quickly, though, had played merry hell with my mouth and I turned away a moment to wipe off the tiny bubble that I sensed in the wedge of my lips.

I faced Amy again and leaned towards her, determined to kiss her properly.

Amy backed away the same distance.

My arm had hung loosely around her until then, but when she pulled away a fraction I tensed my muscles to hold her still. She kept leaning away further and further and drawing me with her and, because my mind was on other things, I didn't know I'd lost my balance until I fell against her.

Amy pushed me away and stood up. ‘I don't like the spastic way you fall on me,' she said, with a kind of panic in her voice. ‘And I don't want you to kiss me, all right. It's not happening. I can't stand the spit in the corner of your mouth.'

I'd hauled myself upright by this time, but my head wasn't straight about any of this. The words she'd said wouldn't go into my ears and yet they already had. All I could do was stare up at her, too shocked to speak.

She seemed to find my silent gaze as annoying as my attempt to kiss her. She turned away from me, pressing her hands together then throwing them apart to end up behind her as though she didn't know what to do with
them. From the look on her face you'd think she was fighting every thought that entered her head.

‘I don't want anyone to know about us. Actually . . . actually I think we should stop the little things we've been doing, the touching at school and meeting up together. Stop it now, before anyone finds out and then there's nothing to explain, you know, like people asking why you broke up and all that crap. It's not like we've really been together.'

‘You don't mean that,' I said, yet the words she'd used showed that she did.

‘It's not a real relationship, anyway. Just friends talking and having fun.'

‘It's real to me. It's all I think about. That wasn't just something I made up, it's the truth.'

‘I'm sorry if you got the wrong idea. Friends, that's all it was. I don't want things to go further than that. I never did, right from the start, not when I've always known your problems. That's why I only kissed you to the side, sort of. I mean, the spit . . .' and she shuddered as she said it.

I don't remember much after that, not the words or the movements of my pathetic body. How I ached, though – I remember that. I'd been opened up with a razor blade, like those horses, and everything had spilled right out of me until I was empty inside.

My memory starts up again later, when I was walking home with the same tears in my eyes I'd fought on my way home from Kibble's paddock. Then it had been the long streets ahead of me that my CP couldn't overcome. Now I
could see my whole life stretching off into the distance and it seemed just as impossible. I'd known pain before, in my muscles and joints, the pain after falls and the different kind of smarting when words were sneered in my face, but I'd never known this pain before, a hurt so deep in my chest I could barely breath.

My cane got me home, not because it held me up when my clumsy legs wouldn't go as fast as I demanded, but because its wolfish eyes glared at me whenever I opened my hand to look. I'd been so inside myself when I first left Amy's, I'd simply carried it without letting it touch the ground. When I did, it was as a weapon to scar a shallow gouge into the gravel footpath. Another and another. It was a wonder there was anything left of the rubber stopper, but those angry slashes replaced shameful tears as my way of handling what had happened.

It couldn't help me when I got to my room, though. I lay on my bed for the rest of the day with an arm across my face; didn't pick up a book, didn't care. If Svenson had demanded a word from me, I'd have had one ready, a particularly Palmerston word, he would agree.

I was gutted.

Sunday wasn't done with me yet. With the light mostly gone from my windows, Mum knocked at my door.

‘Jacob, dinner's ready.'

‘I'll come get a plate in a minute,' I answered, planning to avoid her. ‘I'm studying. Last exam tomorrow.'

She opened the door and looked down at me stretched along the bed. I hadn't been off it for hours and she knew it.

‘Are you all right?' she asked. ‘Been very quiet since you got home.'

‘Fine, fine. I
am
going to study. Before sleep is the best time, they say. Stays in your mind better.'

‘Sounds good, but I want us to eat at the table together, first. Some things I need to say,' and she went off up the hall, leaving me to follow.

I sat up too quickly and had to wait on the edge of the bed until my head cleared. When I did stand my arm brushed against something that thudded to the floor. My
cane. I took it with me to the dining room, wondering if it would be the last time I'd used it.

‘It's not there to wind you up,' I told Mum when she watched me prop it against the table. ‘I just feel better with it in my hand.'

An emotional crutch, I told myself, and despite my low spirits a snort of laugher sneaked out.

‘What are you chuckling at?' Mum asked. She seemed pleased that I hadn't retreated into a solemn mood simply to endure this dinner with her.

I waved her question away. ‘Nothing that'd make any sense.'

She accepted that, then asked, ‘Can I see it?'

Only when she extended her arm did I realise she meant the cane and too quickly my reluctance showed. Mum pulled her hand back to her side. More than that, her face dropped and her shoulders slumped like a leaky balloon.

‘I'm sorry, Jacob, I've been holding out on you. It wasn't fair of me.'

In a handful of words the tables had turned and Mum was now the reluctant one.

‘What do you mean?' I asked.

‘Your cane,' she said meekly. ‘I rang the specialist on Friday. He said if a cane helped with your confidence, you should use it.'

‘My confidence?' I muttered, uncertain of what she meant.

‘With walking, staying on your feet, that sort of thing,' Mum said, surprised that I didn't understand.

If it seemed that way, it was because confidence had a wider meaning and I was trying to work out why it had touched me so strangely. When Amy had used her razor blade on me today so much had dropped out and I wondered if I could have made it home without that wolf's head. I was on the verge of tears again, not because of the Amy thing, but in gratitude towards the cane at my side. I grasped the handle and felt the tears back off like a wary thief when the victim shows some fight.

‘Was that why you were crying on Friday night?'

‘You heard, did you?' she said. ‘Yes, one of the reasons.'

So there were more. I didn't want to ask what they were and that seemed to brand me a coward all over again. ‘I didn't know what to do, whether to say anything.'

‘Best to let me have my tears,' she said and even managed a smile. ‘You want to know the rest, don't you?'

‘You seemed pretty upset.' How could I say that the sobs wrenching out of her came from so deep I'd imagined blood across the bedspread?

‘It was the silence, the emptiness of the house,' she said. ‘I'd finished some Council work on the kitchen table and went out to the lounge room. You'd gone to bed. Maybe you were studying. There was no music, no sound from your room, the lounge room was dark. I could have turned on a light, I suppose, but instead I sat in the darkness knowing your father wasn't coming home and I thought this is how it will be, some nights at least, and I wasn't
ready for it, wasn't ready for my life when you've left home same as Tyke. Then there was the massage I wouldn't do for you. That was unforgivable.'

I watched her for signs of tears, but like me she had those under control. I doubt her body had had time to make any new ones after Friday, when everything came out of her. We had that in common, then. Two empty beings.

Dinner was going cold on our plates so we made a start, switching to safer topics. ‘What exam do you have tomorrow?'

‘English,' I said, attempting a wry smile to soften the connection to her favourite teacher.

‘Your Mr Svenson, eh? He's certainly brought you on in his subject. I can't deny that.'

Mum pushed a few stray peas into the edge of her mashed potato as though they would form her next mouthful. Instead, she carefully placed knife and fork on the side of her plate and, after a pause, gazed across at me. The movement was so like the last time Svenson's name was mentioned at this table I feared she'd read his comment on Mahmoud's wall.

‘I've been holding out on you about that, too,' she said. ‘If you want to go to Brisbane next year, give uni a try, you should do it.'

She let me take that in, watching my face while I could only guess at what those words had taken out of her.

‘I was unfair to you,' she went on. ‘Being so against the university idea and insisting you work with me at Merediths. I told myself a couple of years would show you
what working life is all about and then you could decide what training you needed, that it would be best for you, but, really, it was what suited me.'

Mum paused in a way that told me her next words were the ones she found hardest. I was wrong about the tears, too. They were already glistening at the edge of her eyes.

‘Jacob, what you said about being a dog that I needed for company . . . I was very hurt, but only because there was more truth in it than I could admit. The way I saw it, Tyke was always going to leave as soon as he could, but your CP meant I'd have you for longer.'

I don't know how she didn't cry at that moment, although it's a borderline thing when tears roll down a woman's cheek yet she stares straight ahead and doesn't make a sound.

‘You can live with Tyke if that's what suits you both, or you can try for a place in one of the colleges. We'll support you whatever you want.'

I'd thought today would go down as the worst day of my life, yet somehow it had turned up a gift I couldn't have expected. A free pass. Mum was practically waving me out of the door.

‘I don't know what to say, Mum. It's not like I won't see you every few weeks. Tyke will bring me back with him when he comes to visit and uni has a ton of holidays.'

‘Yes, it does,' Mum agreed with the scorn of someone who barely took a holiday at all.

She seemed relieved to make light of something after the solemn way she had been talking. We both were.
Without knowing what I'd done, I had taken hold of her hand, much as I'd reached for Amy's. I stood up and so did Mum and there in the dining room we hugged. God, how I needed that hug and the grip Mum had on me showed it was the same for her.

‘It's your choice, Jacob. It always should have been,' she said, summing up, it seemed to me – yet behind her smiles I detected a sadness creeping back into place. She had the resigned look of someone who has done the right thing, even though it wasn't the right thing for her.

I woke on Monday morning and knew immediately that I couldn't leave Palmerston. Everything I'd ever needed Mum had done for me, got for me, made others jump until it happened for me. How many trips to the city, how many hours of exercises, how many fights did she win with doctors because I was her son? She'd never let me endure anything alone and last night she'd been asking me to return the favour, just for a year or two. Those weren't her words, just their meaning, and understanding that wasn't something Svenson had taught me, either. I couldn't leave her to cry herself dry like she had on Friday night.

I'd tell her later and in the meantime I had one last exam. Considering the decision I'd come to overnight, I wondered why I was so keen to do well. There was a reason, though. If I was in the mood to repay debts, then Svenson deserved his due.

A hundred metres short of the school gate I forgot about exams. A girl on the footpath could be . . . No, when
she looked around I knew it wasn't Amy, but she'd be in the school grounds somewhere. For a few moments I couldn't swallow and a hand moved to my stomach as though there really was a razor's incision beneath my shirt.

I took the roundabout way behind the library until I could see the entrance to the gym, and when we were called inside I kept my eyes low and local to the few metres around me until I was seated with the cane on the floor beside me again.

Later, when all the papers were collected and we were allowed to leave the gym, I waited behind, hoping to make my exit as Amy-free as my entrance. I had the entire gym to myself when Chloe appeared in the double doorway, silhouetted against the harsh summer light as Amy had been not so long ago.

‘How'd you go?' she called from ten metres away. Her voice bounced around inside the empty space as though a hundred people had asked the same question.

I gave a noncommittal shrug like you were supposed to, then entertained her with some of the poses I'd worked out in front of Mum's mirror. ‘This cane's the best present I've ever had,' I told her and my honesty earned the most fabulous smile.

‘You should smile like that all the time,' I said. ‘You'd have every boy in town on your tail.'

‘Like I'd want that?' she laughed, but I think she liked what I'd said.

‘It's not just walking, you know. This cane's got me through a lot in the last few days.'

She lost her smile, but knew not to ask. ‘So, it's over, and we just have to hang around until Friday. I was wondering, since you'll have a bit of time, whether you're going to do anything more with Mahmoud's page?'

Good question, and one I had no answer for, not there in the gym.

‘You've been proved right, after all,' she said, prompting me.

‘I don't care about being right.'

‘Maybe not, but you've got to feel some kind of vindication. You wouldn't be human, otherwise. I thought what you posted on Saturday was pretty tame, really. People are watching, Jacob, more than show up on the wall.'

She was hinting at something that begged me to ask, but Svenson was heading our way with a thick folder of exam papers in the crook of his arm.

‘My reading for the next few days,' he announced, making a face.

‘I was just asking Jacob about the Facebook page he set up for Mahmoud. Now that there's been . . .'

Svenson jumped in before she had a chance to go any further. ‘Yes, I've been following it. I posted some thoughts myself a few days back and they seem to have disappeared.'

He knew how those pages worked, who decided what stayed posted and what didn't.

‘I took it down,' I told him plainly.

‘Ah, censorship,' he declared, but not in a serious tone. ‘That's not what I'd expect from one of my students, after all the discussions we had in class.'

Yeah, okay, the tone was still lighthearted, but the words were meant to sting.

‘What you said wasn't fair to all the people who'll lose their jobs at the meatworks,' I said.

‘I wasn't having a go at them,' Svenson responded, and this time he
was
serious. ‘It's the town that's brought this disaster on itself because of the way it treated the whole Rais family. People could have spoken out, supported them.'

‘We did,' I pointed out. ‘People like Chloe here. She was part of the knife protest.'

‘Chloe's not from Palmerston,' countered Svenson. ‘She's an outsider as much as I am.'

No, I thought to myself, no one's as much an outsider here as you, Mr Svenson.

‘I'm a Palmerston local,' I said.

‘Are you, Jacob?' he came back at me. ‘Are you the typical Palmerston type? You've got the sense to get out first chance that crops up.' He shook the exam papers cradled in his arm. ‘Makes you different from a lot of these kids.'

I'd talked to Chloe about uni, but not Svenson, except for listening to him in class. I glanced her way, wondering if they'd discussed me. Whatever the truth, he was getting on my goat.

‘You think the only people who stay here are the losers who can't make a life somewhere else. Is that it?'

Svenson wouldn't answer my challenge, but his silence and the hard look on his face showed it was exactly what he believed.

‘You make it sound like civilisation hasn't reached this far, like Palmerston isn't fit for human beings, like you can't live a decent life out here.'

If I imagined I'd put him on the back foot, I'd have to think again. This was Svenson, the man who insisted on a single word to convey meaning.

‘It's so much less than life can be out here, Jacob. That's what I wanted students like you and Chloe to see, and others in that room with you if they would only lift their sights a bit higher.'

Saliva was gathering in my mouth even as I willed the muscles of my throat to do their job. All those hours of therapy and I'd never needed them as much as I did now. Svenson was going down.

‘I'm fed up with the way you go on about Palmerston,' I told him. ‘That comment you put on Mahmoud's wall was full of shit.'

‘Jacob!' Chloe gasped.

I was too fired up to take any notice and kept my eyes on Svenson.

‘You dump on the town and you've never taken the time to see all the good things about it and the people who give more of themselves than you'll ever do, to family and friends, to people they hardly know.'

I was thinking of Mum, of course, but I didn't have to ‘lift my sights' much higher to add Mr Henry who'd
driven me up to Kibble's paddock and Mrs Schwartz who'd come back to her home town to run herself ragged for every kid in her school.

No point listing them off to Svenson. I kept at him. ‘People here don't ask a man what he thinks of Mahmoud Rais and then march him off to hell if he gives the wrong answer. In your own way, you're more prejudiced than anyone in Palmerston.'