Jack and Mel rode home without speaking, Mel this time the one to be hanging back. It was a quiet, contemplative ride, for they had left class a whole hour early, and there were no other kids to either pass or overtake them, either walking, on bikes, in cars, or on the school bus.
Arriving at their respective gates, Jack opened his and pushed his bike through as Mel offered to ‘be a witness’. Jack merely brushed the flaky blood from his neck and pushed his hair over his ears. He saddled his bike and was already pedalling off when Mel called after him, ‘She’s lost, Jack!’
Jack braked and glanced over his shoulder. Why was Mel feeling sorry for her?
‘But we’re not, Jack. Don’t you ever forget that.’
When he got home, everyone else was out. He cleaned up his ear then stepped outside to stare at that one island of joy and mystery in his life, the house enclosed in the wooded hamlet atop the hill.
He made his way through the ghost gums, avoided the gate to their garden, and slipped through the wires of the fence where it was closed in with trees. He gazed through the branches at the sagging veranda, remembering back to the first time he’d spied someone stepping out from under it: Juliet, when the Mitchell boys unloaded the last of her things.
Why was he spying now?
He could see Dash in his felt smoking jacket, Juliet in her long dress coat and Mel still in the clothes she’d worn to school. The three were standing talking on the chipped stone drive, Dash’s Valiant parked nearby.
Jack gulped nervously before emerging from the wood to join them. Juliet stopped speaking, mid-sentence. Dash stepped back, palm raised.
‘You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t come near me, Jack. Please get him away.’
Juliet stepped between them. ‘Go away, Jack.’ It was the first time she’d ever been short with him, and the pain of it cut deeply.
‘But why? Why?’ he asked.
‘Please,’ she insisted.
‘But Mum!’ cried Mel, grabbing Jack and holding him so he couldn’t leave.
Dash looked like he might be about to cry, or had been crying. It troubled Jack deeply to see Dash so upset; because it occurred to him for the first time he had found something infinitely comforting in Dash’s charismatic demeanour. Until then, he’d seemed immune from the world. But if this man, this cool, calm collected man, was in this state, what hope for him in life—a shy, timid boy?
Juliet pinned Jack with her eyes. ‘Jack, why did you say that about Dash?’
Jack looked from one adult to the other.
‘I didn’t! I didn’t say anything! They asked me questions. I didn’t know what they were asking!’
Juliet’s stiffness of manner somewhat thawed and she knelt down and took his shoulders. ‘Jack, look at me. Only at me. Has Dash ever harmed you?’
Jack looked from Dash to Juliet. ‘No. Never!’
Juliet and Dash shared a look.
‘He seems just as surprised at the idea as I do,’ said Dash, shaking.
Juliet stood and began pacing, slapping the side of her head in an uncharacteristically ugly gesture. ‘This damned place! I should never have come back.’
Jack had never seen Juliet angry, either. He realised he was trembling himself, like Dash.
Abruptly, Juliet stopped pacing and took Mel’s face in her hands. ‘Darling, you know why Dash is here, don’t you?’
Mel bit her lip. ‘Because he’s going to look after me for a while.’
Juliet swallowed. ‘He’s going to look after you from now on.’
‘Mum?’
‘I’m sorry, we’d hoped it might be here with you finding Jack. But you can see that’s impossible now, can’t you?’
Jack felt his heart fall out.
Juliet smoothed her hair. ‘Come. Let’s see Dash off to his cupboard.’
They stared at her. She waved her arms. ‘Dash—to the cupboard! His cupboard!’
Juliet pointed at Dash’s Valiant as if they were the ones who were confused.
‘There! His cupboard!’
Mel trembled, her bottom lip wobbling. ‘Car, Mum. Dash’s car.’
Juliet swung from them, gripping then smacking her head.
‘Out, out! I want it out!’
Dash dissuaded Jack and Mel from following her, stumbling, into the house.
‘This will all get sorted out… no need to worry,’ he said, as he herded them to his purple Valiant.
Pausing at the door, he turned back, knelt, hugged then kissed Mel on both cheeks, and she, him, till they were giggling. When he stood, Jack stepped forward, arm raised for a handshake. Something in the way Rush stumbled back, made Jack stop short. The rebuff smarted keenly.
Appearing pained, Rush examined his hand then Jack’s, still held, hopeful, in the air. Rush laughed and saluted instead.
‘There’ll be more to this, Jack, and I intend to clear my name. If I’m not able to see you again, when you’re eighteen and can travel, you make sure you look us up on the continent, do you hear? I’ve a couple of contacts in the arts I’ll put you onto. No giving up now.’
Dash sat in his car and tried to shut the door, but Jack had grabbed the handle.
‘One more story. Please!’
Rush glanced between him and Mel. ‘You can tell your own stories now. You two troopers always could.’
They watched the purple Valiant charger all the way down the long driveway, pass through the open gate, and turn left at the main road, disappearing among the broken hills.
‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ whispered Jack.
Dash was leaving, leaving on adventures far and wide, and would be taking Mel. While he, Jack…
The tears welled up and he ran. He ran all the way to the property on the other side of Juliet’s, Mel chasing him.
She eventually caught him up and made him stop, the two panting together like spent foals in the grass tufts, so many blonde eyelashes.
Jack was mumbling to himself, ‘Don’t cry, Jack, don’t cry.’
He tried to run again but Mel grabbed his shirt and wouldn’t let go.
‘Jack, wait. Jack, please wait.’
He wrested back his stretched shirt. ‘I’ll be stuck here, Mel,’ he got out between violent sobs. ‘Stuck without you. Dash lied. Nothing changes. We can’t really travel in time.’
Mel regarded him seriously. ‘Something has changed, Jack. We can read each other’s minds.’
‘Can we?’ he threw off sceptically.
The tears flooded Mel’s eyes too. ‘That dinosaur—you told me where it was by nodding.’
Jack threw up his hands. ‘Yes, by nodding to it!’
Mel was adamant. ‘I can read your mind, Jack.’
Jack found his crying abating, anger replacing it. ‘Don’t lie to me.’
Mel was just as adamant. ‘I would never lie to you, Jack. Never.’
‘You did lie to me, Mel. You said your dad was a spy!’
Mel’s mouth shut. After a long moment, she spoke. ‘Mum told me why my dad and she couldn’t be together. The reason… well, I thought that made him a bad person. That’s why neither told me Dash was my father till I got to know him. I’m so ashamed I ever denied he was my father now. I couldn’t have asked for a better dad.’
‘If I had a dad like Dash, I would never be ashamed,’ said Jack.
‘Daniel’s a great dad, too,’ she said.
‘But he’s so shy, so… and I’m taking after him!’
‘Mum says lots of guys came back from fighting in Vietnam like that.’
Daniel fought in Vietnam?
Jack reached down inside himself and realised he’d always known this too. He wondered if perhaps we all start off knowing everything, and then forget what’s real, what matters, from the prison of maddening dreams: our waking lives.
But if Daniel had fought in Vietnam, what was Jack’s excuse?
Mel reached out to touch him but he pulled away. Angry with himself, he wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
‘Look at me, crying in front of a girl.’
Mel’s face collapsed in great heaving sobs and Jack felt a searing shame come over him. What an idiot he was! Mel was soon to lose so much more than him. He reached out and, for the first time, took her hand.
The two walked along the undulating hills in silence, till they had gone beyond either’s property, to the base of Mount Miller itself. This, they climbed, just as silently, helping each other up steep banks, over tumbled rocks, and finally to the very peak, where the world opened up in every direction.
Jack began humming the first few bars of Polovtsian Dances in his head. Mel then sang the next few out loud.
Jack spun round to her, in raptures, Mel nodding as if to say, ‘See, we can read each other’s minds.’
Jack felt a surge of inexpressible joy, and hugged her, pointing to a collection of boulders.
‘Can you see it?’
The rocks reformed.
‘Saint Basil’s Cathedral,’ she declared.
The two danced between the rocks, now walls; through trees, now pillars; past logs, now pews; and finally came to a halt in front of a great, upward jutting shaft of granite, now a magnificent organ in their re-imagined cathedral of nature.
‘I’ve found you,’ they both whispered.
At the dinner table with his family, no one speaking, Jack played with his food. The phone rang. Daniel rarely got calls so he remained seated. When Jean likewise did not make a move to answer it, Daniel got up and took the call himself.
It was Juliet, sounding short and strained. She wanted Jack to come over. When Daniel questioned whether that was wise, she cut him off and explained tiredly that, no, Dash was not there; no, none of them would be there soon; and yes, the town had won and Daniel and Jean could have their lonely little hamlet back.
When Daniel rang off and relayed the situation, Jean said no.
Daniel resumed eating. The silence continued until he brought his hand down hard on the table, the cutlery and glasses jumping.
‘Let him stay the night, damn you!’
Jean turned her stony face to him. Simon and Jack shrunk into their seats. Unable to bear another moment, Jack grabbed his knapsack and ran out the front door, not even closing it behind him.
The Cubby House window caught the last of the daylight before the sun crouched below the trench of night.
Inside, Jack and Mel were giggling, drawing, the shaded light flickering overhead. The moths fluttered like pleasant, insistent thoughts. Mel kept drawing over Jack’s work till soon their lines were chasing each other. Normally, Jack liked his pictures executed with neatness and clarity. This time, he was happy for messiness.
‘I still don’t understand about Dash,’ Jack said. ‘If ever two people seem like they should be together…’
Mel smiled warmly. ‘He was right.’
Jack cocked his head.
‘Dash! We can tell our own stories.’
She got up and put on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Jack had heard Tchaikovsky’s sonorous, swelling sounds before, with his Piano Concerto No. 1, but this was something else and beyond.
‘Will this answer my question?’ he asked, amused.
‘Shoosh!’ said Mel, and began to narrate her tale. ‘In a dimly lit but stately room in Saint Petersburg, Russia, a secret “court of honour”, presided over by none other than the Tsar himself, gathers to sentence a certain Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The year is 1893.’
Jack felt himself enclosed in a brilliantly ornate room where serious, bearded gentlemen in fussy attire were gathered. The music, meanwhile, had quickly become a carousel of emotion, a swirling, building, collapsing epiphany of beauty and intense, passionate feeling.
‘You see,’ whispered Mel, shining a torch under her chin, ‘Tchaikovsky had tried marriage, but had not been happy and made the woman he was with miserable too. But he had found love eventually, he had been rewarded for his work in the vineyard, when he fell into the arms of a nephew of a powerful duke.’
Mel conjured for Jack a dim cloistered room where the dapper Tchaikovsky and handsome duke held hands on a divan. But then the door burst open, and in ran armed police.
The notes seesawed with an almost sickening intensity of feeling, a feeling so bloated Jack wondered how it might spend itself.
Mel killed the electric light so now only the moon and the torch lit her face. ‘Tchaikovsky was given an ultimatum: take arsenic or face public exposure and humiliation!’
She flicked off her torch as the music swung upwards, a first cantering, then galloping, hoof-fall of aching vitality.
Jack saw Tchaikovsky in a room with all the blinds drawn, a light from above falling on his head, while a faceless figure proffered him a goblet of plashing liquid as a ring of cloaked figures stepped from the darkness.
Mel flicked back on the torchlight, shining it under her chin. ‘Tchaikovsky’s lover sits in the audience at a performance of Swan Lake, surrounded by the shadowy figures and other members of the Tsar’s court.’
Jack felt himself on the precipice of a theatre balcony, overlooking a stage of swirling, pirouetting dancers. Next to him, he espied the nephew of the duke, leaning forward, wringing gloved hands.
‘As Tchaikovsky died painfully of what was passed off as cholera, the Tsar and his court listened to the music of not only Russia’s greatest composer, but one of the greatest composers of all time!’
Jack watched in abundant horror and misery as the tears ran down the cheeks of Tchaikovsky’s companion, the music soaring to its final expression of longing, before turning and endlessly retreating, like an unceasing tide.
Mel clicked her fingers. Jack stared at her. Her story had drawn him in so completely, and he fully understood its meaning. He speculated if perhaps in time he might illustrate her stories, that storytelling was the foremost talent she possessed, of a considerable many, that united they could wow the world.
If Rush had boyfriends, that didn’t seem bad to Jack. He’d wanted a male friend himself till Mel came along and he found out girls could like science fiction, too.
For the first time he’d known her, Mel appeared shy, almost vulnerable.
‘You’ll still… me and Dash… I mean, will you…’
‘Visit you two in Europe?’ Jack threw a pillow at her. ‘Try stopping me!’
It was nearly time for bed. Both luxuriated in their yawning. And yet they dallied in turning off the light altogether, for when might they experience this again, wrapped in blankets and open sleeping bags, the stars outside winking?
Jack found himself humming ‘Days’.
Mel sat up. ‘Not that song.’
‘You don’t like that song?’
‘I love it. I love it! Only…’
She looked around then whispered a line from it:
But then I knew that very soon you’d leave me.
So she was troubled by it too? But they’d found each other. They’d found each other and Jack knew neither would ever willingly let go.
The image of the ‘unhappiness brigade’ from Mel’s Tchaikovsky story flickered across Jack’s mind. He knew it still existed. He knew it had never not existed. His father had hinted it would bring down Whitlam too.
Mel brought out the cards for their telepathic exercises and showed Jack. ‘Shall we?’
Jack looked at them. The concentration needed… he was tired.
‘We can always ring each other, you know,’ he joked.
Mel fixed her eyes on him forlornly. ‘Perhaps not… where I’m going.’
Jack did not wish to refuse her, so he sat up, massaging his temples ‘to get the lobes working’. Something like that—he didn’t know the technical language.
Mel shuffled the cards. ‘I tried sending you one last night.’
‘You!’ he scoffed.
Mel tried to be offended. ‘You’re not the only one good with pictures.’
Indeed, her skills in that area had increased, just as his had in music and singing.
She picked a card, making sure not to let Jack see, then imitated his temple-rubbing routine while he dropped his hands and closed his eyes, with her concentrating on sending, him on receiving.
After a long moment, he unscrewed one eye. ‘A square?’
Mel showed him the card. ‘Yep. Like you.’
She picked another card and tried sending it as well.
‘Circle.’
‘Yep.’
‘What goes round, comes around,’ said Jack. ‘Nothing changes.’
Mel drew another card, the cross, but hesitated. Something about picturing that cross burning through the front of her head and into Jack’s caused her to shiver. Seeing Jack had his eyes closed already, she leant over to her bag and chose a new card that she had made the night before, this one of a heart.
She concentrated. Jack concentrated. Time stretched. Light, that had travelled a billion years, found their window and fell on their expectant faces.
At last Jack opened his eyes and said tentatively, ‘A cross?’
Mel shuddered. The card she first picked must still have been imprinted on her mind; un-erased by that other.
Jack asked again.
Mel swallowed. ‘Yes.’
‘You’re lying?’
‘No,’ said Mel. ‘Is that what you see?’
‘Yes. I see a cross and I see you.’
Mel rubbed her shoulders like she was cold.
‘What don’t you like about crosses?’ he asked.
One of their bike rides had taken them to the cemetery, where they’d run around, tracing the often illegible epitaphs with their fingers, calling out to each other what they could decipher of the moss- and weather-eaten words: ‘Here lies… beloved daughter… soul-mate and confidante…’
Strangely moved, Mel had asked if it were right that whole lives should be abridged to a sentence. Her and Jack’s would fill a paragraph, surely? ‘An entire book!’ he’d assured her.
She was still looking glum.
‘Well?’ he pestered her.
She pondered how best to answer before leaning forward. ‘When you look at the books in the library, don’t you see the trees that went into making them?’
Jack cocked his head. ‘I don’t understand?’
‘This, here, our book. For something good…’ she murmured brokenly, ‘… something good always dies.’
Jack nodded. ‘I didn’t see it that way. But I will now.’ Mel smiled. ‘And I’ll also see you.’
Her smile fell away. Gulping, she got up and ran out. Jack sat up and grabbed the cards, not noticing the heart, and put them aside. He followed her down the rope ladder.
Stepping out from under the Cubby House in his slippers, Jack let his eyes adjust to the night. He stumbled forth, but what he thought was Mel was in fact the long white stem of that lone tree. He returned to the Cubby House, leaving the light on. When he woke in the morning, it had been switched off and Mel lay unstirring beside him.
Toco Productions 