On the Jellicoe Road
My father took one hundred and thirty two minutes to die. I counted. It happened on the Jellicoe road. The prettiest road i’d ever seen, were trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of kilometres away, because i wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, ”whats the difference between a trip and a journey?” and my father said ”Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand”, and that was the last thing he ever said.
We heard her almost straight away. In the other car, wedged into ours so deep that you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. She told us her name was Tate and then she squeezed through the glass and the steel and climbed over her own dead - just to be with Webb and me; to give us her hand so we could clutch it with all our might. And then a kid named Fitz came riding by on a stolen bike and saved our lives.
Someone asked us later, ”Didn’t you wonder why no one came across you sooner?”
Did i wonder?
When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the side of the Jellicoe Road like they’re some kind of garbage, dont you know?
Wonder dies.
——-
They met Jude Scanlon for the first time exactly one year after the accident. At that time, Webb thought nothing would make sense ever again. The pain was worse now because up till then Narnie and Tate and Webb had all just felt numb and if it hadn’t of been for Fitz’s spirit, blasting them out of their grief, Webb honestly believed that the three of them would have made some crazy suicide pact. But during that year, when they were fourteen years old, the numbness went away, replaced by memories that made Narnie disappear inside herself and him ache. He saw the same in Tate. Despite her ability to enjoy most days, sometimes her despair was so great that in a melancholy moment, when she’d allow herself to think of her family, she’d almost stop breathing and he’d hold her and say, ‘Im here, Tate. Im here Tate. Im here.’ As well as her parents, Tate had lost her younger sister in the accident. ‘We were playing Rock, paper, scissors,’ she told him once. ‘I was paper and she was rock so i lived and she died.’
That year, a school from the city had decided to experiment and send all their students from year eight to eleven on a six-week life education project as part of their cadet program. They were to live by the river from mid-September to the the week after the October holidays ended. ‘We can play skirmish,’ Fitz said, clutching his gun, his eyes blazing with the possibilities as the convoy of buses drove into town.
As his Cadet troop jogged along the Jellicoe road, their boots thumping the ground, eliminating anything in their path, Jude Scanlon noticed the damaged poppies. There seemed to be five, bent out of shape, fragments on the bottom of the boot of the kid in front of him; damaged beyond repair. For reasons he couldn’t understand, a sadness came over him, and it was then he saw the girl, standing on the other side of the dirt road, her eyes pools of absolute sorrow, her light-brown hair glowing in the splinters of sunlight that forced their way through the trees. It was as if he had seen a ghost, some kind of apparition, which haunted him through that night. The next day he found himself returning to the very same spot, after hours, with five seeds in his pocket. Then on his knees, he planted something for the first time in his life.
‘They have to go deeper,’ he heard a voice say. ‘Or else the roots wont take.’
There were four of them. Two boys and two girls. He recognised one of the girls from the day before and something inside him stirred. He could tell the speaker was related to her, his hair was the same golden brown, his eyes though, were full of life. The girl on he other side of the speaker was smiling gently and then there was a boy with a wicked grin and laughing eyes.
‘Tate,’ the smiling girl said, extending her hand. ‘And this is Webb and Fitzy and you kind of met Narnie yesterday.’
Narnie.
‘I didnt…we didnt mean to…’
The boy, Webb, shook his head.
‘It always happens.’
‘Maybe you should find another spot to plant your flowers.’
‘There can be no other spot,’ Webb said quietly.
Jude pulled the rest of the seeds from his pocket and they all took one each then side-by-side on Jellicoe Road they planted the poppies.
-
Each day, at the same time, Jude would return and each day they would be there, led by Webb whose life could not have been more different to his. Where Webb’s memories of childhood were idyllic and earthy, Jude’s reeked of indifference and role-playing. Webb read fantasy, Jude read realism. Webb believed a tree house was the perfect place for gaining a different perspective on the world, whereas Jude saw it as perfect for surveillance and working out who or what was a threat to them. They argued about sports’ codes and song lyrics. Jude saw the rain-dirty valley, Webb saw the Brigadoon. Yet despite all this, they connected, and the nights they spent in the tree house discussing their brave new worlds and not so brave emotions made everything else in their lives insignificant. Somehow the world of Webb and Fitz and Tate and Narnie became the focus of Jude’s life.
The next year, as the Cadet buses drove into Jellicoe, Jude was desperate for a sign. A sign that would tell him that things would be the same as the year before. He’d spent most of the year wondering about them. Had they fallen out of love with each other? Did Narnie still have that half-dead look? Had Fitz got himself into trouble? Had they outgrown him?
But there they were, on the steps of the Jellicoe General store, where the Cadets always stopped to pick up supplies. Waiting. For him.
‘Who are they?’ the Cadet sitting next to him asked.
Jude looked at Webb’s face, the grin stretching ear to ear.
‘They’re my best friends. Im going to know them until the day i die’
