The Beauty Is in the Walking (9 page)

Svenson drove me home.

‘Don't get too down on yourself, Jacob,' he said before he'd even turned the key. ‘You shouldn't see this as a defeat.'

‘What is it, then? I messed up.'

‘You didn't go there for a cheap victory. That's not what direct action is about. You've achieved what you set out to do.'

I stared across at him. What planet was he living on? ‘We got crap on our faces.'

‘You put the police on notice, that's what you did, called their bluff, showed they can't run this case through the newspaper. I bet they're scared, actually, because there's no hard evidence and if they charge Mahmoud they'll be laughed out of court. You rattled their cage, mate. No wonder they gave you a hard time. Look, don't lose any sleep over it, okay?' he said as though the whole thing had already blown over.

I wasn't so sure. All the same, I felt better by the time Svenson pulled up outside my place. Bloody sports cars. I
needed three attempts to lever myself upright and just as I was waving Svenson off Mum turned into the driveway. She was out of the car quickly, in time to glare at Svenson as he U-turned for the trip back into town.

‘What's that about?' she asked coolly.

‘He gave me a ride home, that's all.' A timely brainwave kicked in. ‘He told me I did well with my last assignment.' No mother can complain about good marks. It's a rule.

I went straight to my room and lay stretched out on the bed. Sometimes the relief in my body is like a drug that no one else can get high on. You've got to be part of the CP club to understand – the only perk of membership. I needed it because now that I was alone I became despondent all over again. Bloody Mahmoud. Chloe might have been right about wanting to defend himself, but Dan was right, too – a flick-knife was something the whole town would despise.

I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. My calls came to the mobile in my pocket, which, now that I thought about it, hadn't made a sound since I'd arrived home, as though I'd become instantly friendless.

Then Mum's footsteps in the hall and I knew there'd be no knock, just her face in the doorway. ‘That was Cousin Janice. She saw you coming out of the police station this afternoon. There was a crowd. What happened?'

‘We went to see them about something,' I said, keeping my voice low-key.

Like that would be enough!

‘Were you called to see them?' she wanted to know. ‘Why didn't you phone me about it?'

‘You didn't need to know, Mum. It wasn't something criminal, for God's sake. I went with some friends from school. Stop worrying.'

Saved by the phone! Mum backed quickly out of my room and hurried along the hall to answer it and, once she was gone, I took our dog, Mindy, for a walk which my legs could have done without, but I wasn't exactly doing it out of kindness to animals.

It was almost dark by the time I returned. Dad's muddy four by four was in the driveway and both my parents were waiting in the lounge room like the double barrels of a shotgun.

‘I've been speaking to Sergeant Wallace,' Mum said before I'd even let Mindy off the leash. The dog scooted away in search of her dinner, leaving me to wonder what it would be like to have four good legs instead of two dodgy ones.

When I didn't answer, Mum went on. ‘He's not very happy with you. Says you were the leader of some kind of pantomime this afternoon.'

Pantomime! ‘It was a protest.'

‘Is he right, though? Did you organise the whole thing? And it seems there's a knife we have to pick up from the station. What on earth were you doing with a kitchen knife?'

‘It's not like I was roaming around the streets with it. We all had one, in plastic bags, like that one in the paper
this morning. That's what we were protesting about. Everyone's decided Mahmoud Rais is The Ripper.'

‘The police know what they're doing, Jacob. They wouldn't have gone to his home if there wasn't some evidence to suggest he's involved,' said Mum.

‘But that's why we went there to protest,' I shot straight back at her. ‘There's nothing but flimsy bullshit about sightings and knives. If you think that proves him guilty, you're as stupid as the rest.'

‘Don't speak to your mother that way,' Dad snapped.

I didn't apologise, but I dropped the volume from anger to explanation. ‘We were trying to make a point, that's all. The knives were to show everyone has something sharp in the house. If that's all it takes, we should all be suspects.'

I said this more to Dad than Mum, thinking he would be on my side. He'd got behind my heroics in the school yard, even seemed to admire me for it. I was hoping for some kind of knock-on effect, or that he'd take over the questions from Mum and draw things out calmly so she'd understand, but I must have used up all my credit because he stayed quiet.

His silence left the way clear for Mum and she wasn't backing down, not when I stood there as vulnerable on my legs as I'd been at the piss trough.

‘Svenson put you up to this, didn't he?'

‘No,' I said hotly. ‘What makes you think I'd do anything because Svenson told me to?'

‘You've been talking about him a lot lately. He drove you home this afternoon, from the police station, I
suppose. Looks obvious to me. He was using you, Jacob. Protesting, that's a city thing, a uni student thing. It's not how we do things in Palmerston.'

She hadn't forgiven Svenson for last year, even though she'd beaten him better than three guys with cricket bats. I didn't give a damn about Svenson. It was Mum I was angry with because she didn't think I had it in me. She wouldn't let anyone call me a cripple, wouldn't let anyone say a bad word about me, but when I led a protest into the police station there had to be someone else behind it, not her CP son.

I wanted to say all that. I wished I could. It was all there in my head, as deadly as a flick-knife, and maybe that's why I was afraid to say the words.

‘The police were trying to make Mahmoud look guilty through the newspaper,' I began to explain. I had more to say, but she cut me off with an angry outburst of her own.

‘But the Muslim boy could still be the one, Jacob, no matter how much you don't want to accept it. I mean, who else could it be? Nothing like this has ever happened before in Palmerston – the people who live here aren't like that. How are you going to look when the boy owns up to what he's done?'

‘He won't, because he didn't do it. All this stuff about him being close by is so people can believe what they want to believe. You can see that, can't you, Dad? You agreed with me this morning, about the picture in the paper.'

I'd put my father on the spot, but what the hell, I was in the right here and I was totally over letting people
steamroller me because I was Jacob O'Leary who lurched about town on dodgy legs. He knew what I was doing, too, and for long seconds he held my gaze, wondering whether to speak up for me, but when he glanced aside at Mum, it was game over.

Mum went off to the kitchen and I don't know who was more relieved, me or Dad. He spoke to me at last. ‘Your mum's only looking out for you like she always does. She's better at seeing the way through things like this than I am.'

That night he ate dinner in front of the telly, Mum ate in the kitchen and I took a plate to my room.

I dressed and even made my bed on Wednesday morning, all the while avoiding my laptop in the corner. Normally I'd check Facebook first thing, but there was an obvious reason for my reluctance and I had my hand on the doorknob, pretending breakfast couldn't wait, before the shout of ‘coward' became too strong inside my head. Stuff it. If my Facebook page was plastered with abuse, at least I'd know what to expect at school.

I logged on and discovered absolutely zilch and maybe that was the ultimate humiliation – that I simply hadn't made enough of a stir to gain attention. Instead, all the chatter was about Mahmoud, who'd left town yesterday, it seemed, even before we'd climbed the steps of the police station. His father had driven him to the airport in Brisbane and he'd flown to Sydney to live with family down there. I was relieved, to be honest. At last a bit of
common sense because the poor kid would have had to stay cooped up in his family's home for weeks, otherwise.

Dad was already gone when I reached the kitchen, but
The Advocate
was open in front of where I normally sat. The second page featured three photos, one with me at the centre of a huddle and the other two close-ups of Dan, plastic bag beside his face, daring the camera to capture the full force of his commitment and later as he sullenly handed over that same plastic bag to Sergeant Wallace. The headline read, STUDENT DEMO BLUNTED.

Nice one, Kerrod.

The article didn't mention Mahmoud's brother or the time gap between when he was seen and Charlotte's death. Instead, Williamson quoted Chloe about racism and managed to mention that she was new in town. Finally, he revelled in four long paragraphs describing how the knives had been confiscated.

‘That girl had no right to say Palmerston's a racist town,' said Mum. ‘The Council's worked damned hard for the black community. Everyone gets on fine. She was wrong to say that and so were you.'

‘I didn't. The protest wasn't against racism, anyway.'

‘That's not what it looks like there,' said Mum, nodding at the paper.

‘Then it's wrong.'

‘What's printed in the paper is what people believe,' she shot back at me with enough fury to blow the roof off the house. It was only afterwards, while I was getting my bag from my bedroom that I saw the irony of what she'd
said. What the paper printed . . . that was the whole point of our protest. Why couldn't Mum see that?

The drive to school was silent and I wasn't looking forward to the reception I'd get from kids if my own mother wasn't speaking to me. What else could I do but square my shoulders as best as my crooked legs would allow and march through the gate like nothing had happened? I need not have worried, as it turned out. Kids didn't read
The Advocate
and if there were hostile glances I didn't see them. Relieved, I found myself searching for white headscarves near the agapanthus garden and spotted Chloe instead.

‘Have the girls gone with Mahmoud?' I asked before I'd even sat down.

She shook her head. ‘I rang Soraya as soon as I saw the news on Facebook. She's still here and so's her sister, but they're staying home until things calm down.'

‘Nothing else they can do,' I replied and if my voice was wishy-washy weak it was because Soraya had asked for my help right where I was sitting and I hadn't done a thing.

‘Did you see about us in the paper?' I asked.

Chloe made a face. ‘He called it a demo, like we were spaced-out hippies in dreads.'

‘You noticed,' I said and, despite ourselves, we grinned like cats.

‘You're not sorry we did it, are you?' she asked.

The honest answer was yes, but I fudged my reply. ‘Sorry it didn't work out as planned, that's all. I'm bloody
angry about that flick-knife, Chloe. It's like Mahmoud let us down.'

‘Yeah, I thought the same,' she replied and the casual way she said it left me stunned.

‘Seriously?'

‘Makes things easier if victims are all saints, doesn't it? The knife was his father's, Jacob. Must be hard to give up things like that when back in Lebanon he had men wanting to kill his whole family.'

‘Was it like that?' I asked.

‘Soraya told me. All happened before she was born, but the stories are part of her family, like an extra child sitting around the dinner table. That's how she put it.'

‘I know what she means,' I said. ‘Every time the O'Learys get together someone rolls out the story of Dad's uncle on the Kokoda Trail.'

‘Look, it's okay to be annoyed about the flick-knife, but if you really want to get angry, think of how the police and the newspaper were so quick to put a slant on the whole thing.'

Nothing like having your own words fed back to you. I was glad I'd 'fessed up about Mahmoud and the knife and, now that it was done, Chloe was setting my train back on the rails.

‘People are always putting their own slant on things,' she said. ‘Human nature, I suppose. Look at what happened to me when I first came here.'

‘You didn't go round with a flick-knife in your pocket, did you?'

‘Not a flick-knife. My own tongue got me in trouble instead. I told a girl I didn't want to come here.'

Bec had said something about this at the picnic table, but I stayed quiet so Chloe would tell her side.

‘New place, new friends. Should have found out who I could trust first,' she said with a sniff at her own naivety. ‘I was just telling her a bit about myself, but she put it all round the school that I thought Palmerston was for hicks, when I never said anything like that.'

‘You just wanted to stay with your friends,' I sympathised.

‘One friend, really,' she responded and the way she peered determinedly into the school yard rather than at me suggested something. On another day I'd have missed the hint, yet I hadn't and the words were out of my mouth before good sense could clamp my lips shut.

‘A boyfriend?'

Chloe nodded. ‘I was in pretty deep.' She checked out my face and seemed to decide I was trustworthy. ‘Head over heels,' she added, mocking herself, and her tentative smile widened into the warmth I loved to see in Amy's face.

Head over heels. I was jealous and not just of Chloe for being able to say that, but of the nameless boy she was in love with. I wanted a girl to feel that way about me and to say it out loud. Amy, maybe? With her, I was still in the fluffy-cloud land of imagination where a relationship could be any shape and size you dared.