Jewel

I love last words in the same way I love opening lines. Not quite the same way Miles Halter loves them. I love the last words of criminals before they are executed. They often try to be witty, remarking to shooting squads that they haven’t got all day, or they insist on their innocence, which makes you comprehend the finality of the death penalty. How many times has it been proved that someone else was the murderer, long after the death of a blameless man or woman caught in a terrible situation? I love the last words of poets and writers and playwrights who say something magical in a suicide note, or gasp something about love on their deathbed. Or people who are true to their profession to their last breath—like a grammarian, or one of those freaks with word technicality obsessions who spurts in his final moments on earth something like ‘I am dying; or I am about to die—either is correct.’ I’m not sure if that’s what the quote was exactly, and it doesn’t matter; it’s just the idea that I care about.

I love art and the freedom it offers, and I love last words for the way they provoke my mind—I could drift on a train of thought for years, if there was no need to eat and drink and go to school.

I wish they recorded the last words of ordinary people—you can’t find any of those on the internet or in libraries. How unimportant you seem if you don’t do something that society values, if you never grow up and have the chance, or if you aren’t ever given the opportunities others receive, then your last words have no significance.

I came back home to Rachel—Mum, sorry—because I had no one else left, because I hadn’t finished school yet, because I didn’t want to live on my own. I’d just turned eighteen but I was still treated like a child. I was too stubborn to keep a job for long—I couldn’t even work part time in a greengrocer’s— and art was the only thing that mattered to me.

Now that I was back in the suburbs, I just wanted to disappear far away—to a cramped apartment in a dreary part of London, perhaps—and be a struggling artist, sitting with my charcoal and my canvas in the doorways of abandoned houses, drawing. Or in New York City, sleeping on the couches of talented but as yet undiscovered playwrights, drinking coffee all night and speaking rubbish and getting high.

I wanted to run away from this suburb I’d lived in as a young child, which still haunted me with memories, the happy ones hurting me more than the sad ones. But I couldn’t go back to my grandparents. The years living with them on a farm outside a town in rural Victoria were now only bittersweet memories.

My room hadn’t changed while I’d been away, but my mother had. After ten years without her (phone calls were a rarity near the end), it was so strange to call her Mum. When I’d left, she was still ‘Mummy’. She had been plump and had worn aprons and scrunched up her nose when she was concentrating on something. She’d had rosy cheeks and brown curls and got flustered easily.

After ten years Mummy had become Rachel, small and gaunt, falling-out brown curls, sallow-faced, always on the verge of tears, it seemed. What had once been a pretty sort of fragility had become instability.

I looked like my father—my sleek dark hair and olive complexion came from him—but the different-coloured eyes were my own personal curse. Everyone felt like pointing them out, whispering to each other.

In ten years I’d changed too, from a bright eight year old with too much energy and a fondness for crayons to an anti-social and friendless eighteen year old who drew in charcoal and any sharpened pencil.

I was once Jewel Valentine, her whole future ahead of her, each eye a different-coloured diamond, each day starting with vigour for life, like every child. Then I became Jewel Valentine, disenchanted, lonely, victim of the Curse of the Beautiful but Strange.

I knew how I looked—it didn’t have any positive influence on the way I felt about myself. I was five feet and two inches tall, but my height wasn’t the part that mattered, wasn’t the part that bothered me. It was how sharp my features were, the fact that my eyes were so striking, the way my hair fell.

It was these things that drew people in, but it was my personality that pushed them away. I wished they hadn’t noticed me in the first place. I was alone by choice, but I hadn’t counted on that causing me to feel lonely.

One thing that always annoyed my teachers, back when I was living with Grandma and Grandpa, was my lack of involvement. I didn’t want to join teams. I didn’t want to take up basketball or robotics or join the anime club. Also (and teachers never say it, but you know they want to), I’d never had a boyfriend. It wasn’t as if I was gay, either; I hadn’t had a girlfriend. (It was kind of trendy and edgy then to say you were gay, or bisexual, or any of those other words people use to let you know that their sexual desires and the types of people they are attracted to aren’t the norm.) I think it would have made Mrs F happy if she had walked in the front gates of the school one day and seen me locking tonsils with someone of any gender in my year. I probably should have done that. Just to find out. Just to get them off my back.

Nothing scared teachers at that school more than a potential teenaged sociopath. They thought I was going to walk in to school one day with a loaded gun and kill a bunch of Year 10s and say it was because I didn’t like Monday.

Actually, I kind of hated Wednesday, like it was there to intentionally piss me off, sidling in between Tuesday and Thursday, mocking me with its innate Wednesday-ness.

But where would I have got a loaded gun from anyway? I lived a bit out in the country, so I could have got a rifle off a farmer, but that’s not the weapon of choice in killing sprees, from what I’ve seen of late-night true-crime shows (the ones that always claim to have new and damning evidence, but never do).

Their second biggest fear was that I was going to kill myself. They asked me a few times whether I was having ‘urges’ (clearly they weren’t talking about the sexual kind, because that would have been freaky and they don’t tend to continue Sex Education past Year 10—though before then they deliver it liberally: for five years they brought the same nurse in, and she gave the same speech, and we watched the same bad ’80s video, and we had the same awkward Q & A), which, literally translated, means: ‘Been writing emo poetry, Jewel?

Tried to slit your wrists, Jewel? Thinking about trying to OD on your grandfather’s arthritis medicine, Jewel?’ I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was an attention-seeker, I don’t know. I wasn’t going to kill myself— that would have destroyed my grandparents and pushed my mother over the edge (perhaps into a killing spree of her own) and, besides, I still held hope for my future as a bum in London or New York.

I love last words. I wonder what mine would be, as I lay in a gutter, grey-haired and derelict in London or New York. I wonder what the last words of that boy that I saved would have been if I hadn’t been walking past the lake that night, if I hadn’t saved his life.