walk much further up the hill before I saw the orange plastic barricade: a wide orange strip wrapped around trees and signposts, looping in a large circle around what looked like a black nothing. There was no light beyond the barricade, no buildings, no cars. But there were people, three people, standing just on the inside of the barricade; the edge of the light from the closest streetlight caught them in its beam, stopping them from fading into the blackness. They wore uniforms and held long black cylinders, probably torches turned off. Police. They were all facing out to the light, their backs to the blackness, as if to guard the nothingness that was behind them.
I probably wouldn’t have gone any closer if I hadn’t seen the flowers – rows and rows of flowers. They started in a neat line under the orange barricade and then moved out in a wide arc into the full light of the streetlight. There were all sorts of colours: yellows and blues, reds and creams, oranges and pinks. Some were wrapped in cellophane or brightly coloured paper, others were arranged neatly in pots and vases, and some looked like they’d come straight from someone’s yard, bunched together and laid simply on the tar.
I knelt and reached out, gently stroked the petals, touching their satin smoothness.
I didn’t hear the policeman until he was standing tall and blue above me.
‘Mate, I asked you what you’re doing?’
I pulled my hand back from the cream rose petal I was touching. The card attached to the bunch of roses read: ‘For Charlie, our light, our life.’
‘Hey, kid.’ It was a different police officer this time; she was standing next to the other officer. ‘You all right?’
Charlie was the kid with the red hair and the freckles. I remembered him saying it wasn’t fair when it was time to get off the swing.
Then I saw the teddy bear, tiny and blue, pushed in between the bunches. I reached over and picked it up. There was a necklace around its neck, a tiny gold chain with a silver heart attached to it. I brought the bear to my face, felt its softness on my skin. I breathed in the bear’s smell to see if the smell of flowers was there, but all I could smell was the smoke and burnt plastic.
‘Kid, the bear has to stay.’
I tried to breathe the smell of the bear in again but coughed as the smell of smoke caught in my throat.
‘Are you all right? Where’re your parents? It’s late. You shouldn’t be out on your own. What’s your number? I’ll ring home.’
I put the bear back next to the cream roses, snuggled him in under the cellophane and then rolled back on my feet, squatting. From there I could see all the flowers. It was only then that I realised the bear I’d picked up wasn’t the only one: there were blue bears dotted everywhere among the flowers – big, small, smooth, and furry. If I stared straight ahead and squinted my eyes, I could see the blue dots like stars in a dark sky.
‘Your number, kid?’ the policewoman asked again. She had a mobile in her hand, ready to punch in the numbers.
I stood up with my skateboard in one hand and took two steps slowly back. I didn’t think they were going to chase me or grab me. I hadn’t taken anything, hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was ready, just in case – ready to jump on my board and skate to the bottom of the hill if I had to. The last thing Dad needed was one of his sons being brought home by the police. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, turning guardedly away.
The policewoman stood and watched for a moment, then called out after me, ‘It’s late; you make sure you go straight home.’
I walked further up the hill, away from the police officers, and the flowers, and the blue bears. I didn’t look back until the darkness started to swallow me, until I couldn’t be seen anymore. Once it was dark enough, I swung back into the orange barricade and walked along it, every footstep deliberate, the barricade like a rope guiding a deep-sea diver up from the dark.
I followed the wide, steep arc of the orange plastic, letting it take me up the hill to the small block of bushland above where the kindy used to be. The barricade plunged into the bush, dodging and weaving, clinging to tree trunks. I stood at the edge, one foot on the tar, the other on the dirt.
The bush was full of shadows and vines, rustling noises, and tall trees that in the darkness had no tops. I hesitated. I thought the nothingness of the bombsite was what would scare me the most, the emptiness of where the kindy used to be. But instead, it was here, at the edge of the small bush block, that everything started to come unstuck. Ray would have called me a baby. Told me only sissies were scared of rocks and trees. But my body didn’t care. It knew something I didn’t know. My heart was pounding up high in my chest, almost in my throat.
The cool breeze came again, this time from up the hill, and because I was above the kindy, it didn’t carry the smoky smell of the bomb site, only the scent of eucalypts and dirt and forest. It slapped at the back of my neck and stayed there like a hand, guiding and pushing, encouraging me into the forest. I clutched at the barricade as my feet moved forward onto dirt and rocks. Tall gum trees reached up above me. Their branches were like long, winding claws. I walked slowly, placing my feet carefully, so I didn’t trip on any of the twisted roots or stumble on any rocks. The barricade peaked on a smooth boulder. I climbed up and stood there, looking down at where the kindy used to be.
The breeze was still there, light and airy on my cheeks, almost as if it was laughing at me. It was then that I knew what I’d been scared of. The kids from the kindy were there, up high in the gnarled branches, their tiny bodies flapping like lazy Tibetan peace flags in the breeze, watching, waiting. Standing there on the rock, it seemed so simple, so obvious: where else would you go? The bomb blast – orange, red, glaring, roaring – that was when they fled.
Maybe if I was still enough and listened hard enough, I could hear them, like I’d heard Mum on the step. Maybe I was going crazy. All the same, I waited and listened, holding my breath. But there was nothing, just the soft rustling of leaves.
I wanted to tell them it was over. That they could come down and find their way to whatever place it was they needed to go to. But I couldn’t find words that would reach high enough into the trees. Jazzie was there too. I could almost hear her breathing, but she wasn’t talking, not to me, anyway.
The climb down from where the barricade peaked at the boulder was a slipping, sliding scramble of dirt and loose rocks. I let go of the plastic strip and grabbed from tree to tree to stop myself from falling. The light breeze was still playing at the back of my neck, with my ears, and hair. When I finally stepped onto the road on the other side of where the kindy had been and into lamp light, the breeze seemed to sigh, as if the world had run out of air, and then the breeze disappeared.
I left the orange barricade behind, going back down the hill, towards the beach. That was when I realised Mum’s car must be still here somewhere. The realisation sent a shock wave through my body. A need to find it. I needed to bring it home. It was the last place she sat. The last thing she touched. She wouldn’t have been able to get a park close to the kindy, you never could in the middle of the day. It would be on one of the streets nearby.
I worked in a systematic way, going up one street, turning and then coming back down another. There was a fear in my belly, like I was going to stumble across a corpse. She always parked on the north side, closer to the shops, closer to her work. After about twenty minutes, I thought I must have got it wrong, that maybe she had parked on the south side, or even over at the beach, or maybe she caught a cab from her work. But then, all of a sudden, there it was, parked all by itself on the other side of the bowls club, under a streetlight. I jumped the fence and made my way across the neatly trimmed grass of the bowls lawn, jogging but then slowing down to a walk, as if the car was a wild animal that I might scare off. I climbed carefully over the fence on the other side and then stood there staring at Mum’s old green Camry. I had an irrational urge to scoop the car up in my arms, like I would have if it was Jazzie. It looked so alone and lost.
I ran my fingertips along the duco – cold, smooth steel. Pressed the flat of my palm against the coldness, then reached out with my other hand. I leant onto the car so my whole body could feel its cold reality, squashing the side of my cheek onto the glass. The driver’s door opened, heavy and awkward in my hand. There were two muesli bar wrappers in the centre console. A Triple J Hottest One Hundred CD cover from a couple of years back on the passenger seat. It had Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop’ on it. We all knew the words. Even Jazzie. There were McDonald’s wrappers in the back seat. A breakfast treat Jazzie would have begged for – something Mum would never have allowed Ray or I to have. I sat in the driver’s seat and let the door clunk closed. The shape of Mum snuggled around me. I put my hands on the steering wheel. The last place her hands would have been. Reached my feet down to the accelerator and brake where her feet would have rested.
My eyes shut. The car smelt of bacon and egg McMuffin, sunburn cream, and damp, salty towels. But it also smelt of Mum. The Rexona deodorant she used, the apple and pear shampoo.
My knee knocked against the keys that were still hanging in the ignition. I reached down and pulled them out. There were five keys and three different key rings: a flower made from red see-through plastic; three metal balls threaded together on a piece of leather; and a photo of Jazzie doing a painting that the kindy had made into a key ring. The photo is one of those ones where the eyes stare straight back at you, as if the person in the photo is saying, ‘I can see you.’
I traced my finger around the plastic petals of the flower and wondered what happened to the photo key ring I’d made for Mum when I was in kindy. The one where I was building a road out of wooden blocks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it or knew what had happened to it. I wondered if Mum had replaced my key ring with Jazzie’s. My finger kept tracing the plastic petals. I was being stupid. It was only a key ring. It didn’t mean anything. But I had to bite the inside of my lip to stop myself from crying. That was when Mum came. I didn’t hear her or see her, but I felt her hand resting on my leg and knew she was sitting in the passenger seat.
She stayed until my breathing came back to normal and I could release the bite I had on my lip. She stayed until I could let the keys fall into my lap. Until my jaw began to unclench. When I opened my eyes, I knew she was gone. The photo of Jazzie painting was smiling at me.
I put the keys in my pocket and got out.
The walk from the car to where the kindy used to be wasn’t far. It was ridiculous, but I had to know how many steps she had taken. How much time she’d had to change her mind. How much time she’d had to choose us instead of Jazzie.
Fifty-seven to the barricade.
The three police officers were looking up the hill. All three of them had their backs to me. I stood still for a moment, making sure there were no other police guarding the darkness.
Fifty-eight on the other side of the barricade.
I stared into the inky dark. It was hard to tell exactly where the kindy had been.
Fifty-nine, sixty.
There were bits of charred wood, broken glass, pieces of twisted downpipe, piles of bricks, a long flat piece of metal that looked like it could have been the slide of the slippery dip. Everything was low to the ground. Nothing higher than my waist.
Seventy-eight steps got me to where I thought the kindy would have been.
I stood in one spot, my feet on a small patch of dirt surrounded by the rubble and debris. I turned slowly around and looked up the hill at the bush block. The tall trees looked simply like trees now: there was nothing ghost-like about them, no tiny souls waiting to be set free from their branches.
But then I heard crying, not from up in the trees but down close to me. My heart raced, and for a moment I thought somebody had survived the bomb blast. That somebody was stuck under a heavy piece of wood or rubble. Somebody the police and search rescuers had missed. A cold sweat pricked my skin; my mind scrambled to try and make such a wish come true. What if? But then I listened closer, listened harder. The crying wasn’t a panic, wasn’t someone calling for help. It was the same sadness that had swollen and taken over every part of me.
I moved towards the sound and then stopped and listened again, peering into the dark. There was movement, a slight shuffling, like someone moving their bum across the ground. Then I saw the shape of a person, hunched forward behind a pile of rubble.
I didn’t realise it was Ray until I was right up close. Ray crying tears he clearly didn’t want anyone else to see. I didn’t say anything. I sat down next to him and put my arm around his shoulders, rubbing small circles like Mum would have done if she was there, if Ray would have let her. He cried harder, his head buried down on his knees, his whole body shaking as if it might crumble into the rubble he was sitting among.
I don’t know how long we sat there for. My bum went numb, cold, a hard rock pushing into it, and my shoulder ached from holding my arm around Ray. But I didn’t take it away.
When Ray finally did stop crying, he sniffed forcefully and brought his chin up so it rested on top of his knees. I waited for him to shove me away or at the very least shrug my arm off him, but he didn’t, so I left it there.
‘You okay?’ I asked, before I had a chance to think whether speaking was a good idea or not.
‘Yeah. You?’
I wanted to say no, but instead I said, ‘Yeah.’
‘You got a hanky?’
I took my arm down and shoved my hand into my pocket, where there were two scrunched-up tissues. I pulled them both out and tried to flatten them, then handed them to Ray.
‘Thanks.’ He blew his nose hard. ‘You think they’re going to tell us to get out?’
‘Dunno. Maybe, if they see us. They weren’t too happy when they found me looking at the flowers.’
‘What’d you go down there for? Right in front of ’em?’
‘Dunno, the flowers.’
‘Police are never happy to see kids, especially if you’ve got a skateboard tucked under your arm and it’s after dark.’
‘I guess.’
I thought Ray might get up and walk away then, tell me to go home, but he didn’t. He stayed sitting so his shoulder was pushed up against mine.
‘Ray?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Do you really think she chose?’
‘What?’
‘Do you think she chose Jazzie over us?’
Ray didn’t answer.
I picked up a rock from the dirt in front of me, rubbed it between my thumb and finger. ‘I found her car.’
Ray spun round to look at me. ‘Where?’
‘Couple streets over, parked on the side of the road.’
Ray looked away. ‘Guess it had to be here somewhere. Surprised the cops haven’t found it and brought it back to us. Not exactly doing a sterling job, are they?’
‘The keys were still in it. The door was unlocked, and the keys were still in it.’
Ray was quiet.
‘Seventy-eight steps, Ray.’
‘What?’
‘Seventy-eight steps from her car to here.’
‘Jesus, you counted every step?’
‘Seventy-eight.’
‘Jesus,’ Ray said again.
The air was cold now, or was I just cold? I pulled the sheepskin collar up straight around my neck and tucked my hands into my pockets.
‘The police reckon they know who did it,’ Ray said.
I shoved my hands in deeper.
‘They’ve got a name. This kid who went missing the day the bomb went off. They’re not saying anything – of course. They won’t until they know for sure. But when I first got here tonight, I sat real quiet back in the dark where the police couldn’t see me, close enough so I could hear them. I heard them say the guy’s name, the guy who’s been missing since the bomb went off.’ With the toe of his shoe, Ray kicked at the dirt under his foot. Then he said, ‘Mathew Jacobsen. Remember him? He used to go to our school, was a couple of years above me. His little sister still goes there, that girl with the greasy hair that hangs around her face.’
Ray had to be wrong. Mathew Jacobsen had been odd, yes, but not a monster, not someone capable of blowing up a whole kindergarten and its three teachers. Not someone capable of blowing up Mum and Jazzie. In fact, Mum would have said that he wasn’t odd at all. Just a quiet kid who kept to himself.
‘You know the girl I mean?’ Ray asked again. ‘She’s in your year, I think.’
Leah, Leah Jacobsen. The girl no one liked, the girl everyone said smelt of curry and yoghurt. The girl who spent every recess and lunchtime in the library.
‘Just because he went missing on the same day doesn’t mean he did it,’ I said.
‘Bit of a coincidence.’
‘Maybe. Stranger things have happened.’
We sat, silent again. I could hear the waves rolling onto the beach.
‘Should we take the car home?’ Ray asked.
‘Guess so.’
‘Come on then, I’ll give you a lift.’
‘What about your car?’
‘It’ll be right. I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘I could drive Mum’s home.’
‘Yeah right, brilliant idea.’ Ray stood and held out his hand to pull me up. ‘Keys?’
I hated how he thought just because he was older than me, he had the right answer for everything. I reached into my pocket and gave them to him.
We walked in the opposite direction to the police. Ray, a head taller than me, flopped his arm over my shoulder.