What They Say

Somewhere near the West Coast, when we were almost out of the mountain pass, Jackson slowed the car, pointed into the dense forest, and spoke over the thud of music.

“My uncle went missing around here, long time ago.”

“What happened, was he found?”

I didn’t look at him, not wanting to seem too eager. We met nearly a year ago, long enough we had moved in together, short enough I was still discovering new things about him.

Like this, he had blasted music all the way down since we drove off the ferry, and it was a way for him to not have to talk. Days ago, he’d gotten a phone call from his father telling him his grandad had died, and I realized how little I knew of his family. We don’t get on; he had said of his father.

Jackson had slowed down so much a horn blasted behind us, and he swung the car off the road into the shoulder.

“He wasn’t found, just his car was. My grandad’s car actually. He took off in it after an argument. It was found here, out of petrol. They never knew where he went.”

He shoved open the car door and got out, lit a cigarette and looked up toward the mountains. I got out and walked around the car to stand beside him. The air was still and warm. Few cars passed by.

“How long ago?”

He shrugged. “Forty years, something like that? I don’t know. He was sixteen.”

“That’s so young. They must have searched for him.”

Jackson blew smoke toward the sky. “They just figured he ran away or something. He was a troublemaker my dad said. Reckons the whole town was probably glad to see the back of him. He told me about it when I was sixteen, guess he saw it as a warning.”

He flicked the end of his cigarette away and got back into the car. I stepped on the smouldering butt and cast another look toward the forest, so thick and dark. The road swooped long in either direction, disappearing around the bend of the hills, out into the world.

XXX

Jackson’s father’s house was a cottage with peeling white paint, hunched at the base of a gully, hemmed in by the trees.

“You grew up here?” I sat forward in my seat to look more closely, and despite the circumstances I couldn’t help but be happy to be here, that he had asked me to come.

“See why I got away as soon as I could,” he said.

“It’s beautiful though,” I said. And it was, the clouds low on the hills, the greens so rich and dark it looked unreal. Like a postcard of a house.

His father came out from the house and stepped down off the porch as we walked over. He was tall and solid, a grey-haired version of Jackson.

“You made it then. Travel alright?”

“Alright,” Jackson said, and they shook hands, as if they were meeting for business. Not a father and son, who hadn’t seen one another in some six years.

We followed him back up the wooden steps, which tipped slightly under our weight. And I imagined Jackson as a boy, stepping down off this porch each morning. He left at eighteen and never went back.

In the kitchen his father made us coffee. Black without sugar, the way Jackson drank it. He didn’t ask how I wanted mine. I swirled the bitter liquid in my cup, listening to Jackson’s father talk.

“He was found out in his shed, axe beside him. He’d gone out to cut wood. He was still alive then but he died that night in hospital. Eighty-six, not a bad way to go.”

“He would rather be dead than in hospital,” Jackson said.

“That’s right,” his father said. “Soon as he saw those white walls, I reckon he decided he was done.”

He didn’t seem so bad, this father who Jackson never talked about. His mother had lived in Australia since he was a boy.

“Wouldn’t the courts let her take you?” I had asked him, because I hadn’t got out the habit of assuming all families were like mine. All mothers devoted.

He only shook his head, but from the look which shadowed his face I knew I had assumed wrong. We were the same age, but sometimes it felt like he was a lot older.

XXX

“Didn’t know you were such a sports star,” I said to Jackson.

We were in the bedroom which had been his, and it still looked as it must have when he walked out six years ago. Jackets in the wardrobe, caps hooked on the back of the door. A collection of trophies and certificates on the drawers. I wondered why he never took any of it.

“Most valuable player,” I read out. “Most tries of the season. Player of the match.”

He was lying back on the bed, watching me.

“What else was there to do out here?” he asked. “Either that or get drunk and drive into a ditch.”

I put the trophy down and went and got into bed beside him. I’d been a little worried the sheets might have been left unchanged too, but they were crisp and new feeling.

When I flicked off the lamp the room was dark in a way it never was in the city. Darkness so complete it was like a solid thing pressing around us. I couldn’t see Jackson beside me, or my own hand when I held it in front of my face.

“Least you were good at it,” I said. “I could never catch a ball. Playing cricket at school once I got hit in the face with a ball and cracked a tooth.” I grimaced at the memory, even though it was years ago. I still remembered the shock of it, the sudden pain.

“Had to be good,” Jackson said. “I missed a tackle at rugby once, and the other team scored and won the game. My dad was so pissed off he drove off without me, told me to walk home. We were playing out of town.”

“What did you do?”

“Hitched a ride back. Then I went to a friends place for about four hours so he would think I’d walked.”

He laughed, as if he had just told an amusing story. But then he said: “My grandad used to beat him with a dog chain, so he always told me how easy I had it.”

“Oh, that’s so sad,” I said. But I meant both stories. I could see a sliver of grey light through the gap in the curtains, and I looked at it and felt like there was a darkness out here deeper than I could imagine.

XXX

After the service we went into the hall beside the church. The sky was bright with cloud and sun. The rain had stopped and everything looked wet and glistening.

Inside a folding table was laid with plastic plates of sausage rolls and tiny triangles of sandwiches and an urn of hot water.

I made coffee and watched Jackson as he stood with his father and his father’s sister Maureen, who I had met earlier.

His father said something and Jackson said something then he turned and walked from the hall. I put my cup down and went after him.

He was stood outside the doors, smoking, looking over the tiny cemetery beside the church. I could see the fresh cut hole where his grandad would be laid and looked away again.

“Everything alright?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just wanted a smoke.”

“That was strange right?” I asked, thinking of the service. The priest had stood up the front and talked about family and hard work and community, then he read from the bible, something about death and a throne.

“How was it strange?” Jackson asked, flicking ash over the wet concrete. Surely, he had thought so too? I watched him, unease creeping over me.

“They never mentioned your uncle. Only your dad and aunt. The priest even said, he raised two children.”

Jacksons’ father had helped carry in the coffin of the man who beat him, and I had looked at him and thought then, what if Jackson think this is the way life is?

“They never talk about him,” he said. “It would be stranger if they did bring him up. I doubt many people in this town even remember him.”

“That’s so sad,” I said. I thought of my own family, my mother and her sisters and cousins, who still talked about the cousin who went to live in England thirty years ago. If a boy in my family went missing, we would search all of the earth, he would be found, brought home, never forgotten.

XXX

We stopped at Jackson’s father’s house before starting the trip back home. We sat in the kitchen and had coffee and Jackson and his father talked about a big block of land nearby which was going to be subdivided, they talked about the new houses and the new jobs coming.

Once the coffee was finished, we stood up and walked outside again. I realized then that was it. They weren’t going to talk about the funeral or the old man or the lost boy, the years Jackson didn’t come back, or even the day Jackson was abandoned to walk home. The past was a place they didn’t visit.

“I’ll just take a piss before we go,” Jackson said.

He went back in and his father and I stood there on the porch. I tried to think of something to say, but before I did his father spoke.

“Don’t suppose you’ll want to move out here though, will you? Being from the city and all.”

“It’s not something we’ve talked about,” I said. I didn’t want to say, Jackson would never move back here.

“It’s a house though,” he said. “More than most have at twenty-four."

“I’m sorry, what house?” I asked.

“He didn’t tell you yet? He'll get the old man’s place. House isn’t much but it’s a decent bit of land.”

I thought then of Jackson walking out of the hall, his unreadable look as we stood outside. He’d been silent as we drove the short distance to his father’s house.

“Won’t it go to you and your sister?”

“That's what's in the will, he left it all to him. He had a soft spot for Jackson, he’s his only grandson. I think he always hoped he’d come back.”

His expression was blank as Jacksons ever was, no clue to how he felt being bypassed for inheritance. His own father trying to bring Jackson back in the hopeless way of men who couldn't say what they felt.

I was doing exactly what Jackson and his family did, avoiding talking about something uncomfortable. I saw how it must happen, not talking and not talking, everyone waiting for someone else to bring it up, until it would have seemed stranger to mention it than not.

“Didn’t you ever find out what happened to your brother?” I asked him.

He looked unsurprised I had asked, or maybe he was. I couldn't tell.

“Haven’t heard from him since the day he left. Didn’t surprise me if he never got in touch, he hated the old man.”

“But the car,” I said. “Jackson told me the car was found abandoned.”

His father snorted. “The old man was a cheap bastard, always run that thing on empty. Course Colin never got far in it.”

“Did he plan to leave?”

“Me and him were mucking around outside with a cricket ball and smashed out a window. We knew we were going to catch hell for it, and Colin decided right then he’d had enough. Told me he wasn’t going to stick around for it. He used to steal cars all over town, so he just jumped right in the old man’s car and not a minute later it was running.”

He had his head tipped back toward the hills, his eyes unfocused, as if looking to another place, and even when Jackson came back out, he kept talking. All the words unspoken so long tumbling out.

“The old man had been inside but he must have heard it, or he heard the window, I don't know. Colin told me to come with him and I would have but soon as the old man came out, I just froze on the spot. Couldn’t move. Colin tore out of there, and the old man shouted after him if he ever came back, he’d kill him.”

Jackson was leaning against the porch pillar, watching his dad talk. I wondered if he had heard this version of it, where Colin was a scared child, or only the one where he was a tearaway teenager.

“Didn’t he ever get reported as missing?” I asked.

Jackson’s father blinked, looked at me, as if he’d forgotten there was someone listening as he recounted the story.

“He never would have done that. Our mother tried to find him, she used to ask anyone who went out of town to look out for him. She worried he had gotten lost in the forest somehow. I reckon he just went off and started a new life, that’s what I reckon.”

“You could try finding him,” I said. “There’s ways to find people, it’s easier these days.”

But Jackson’s father shook his head, his face gone hard.

“He knows where to find me. If he wants. You two should be off, it’ll rain again soon.”

“Look,” Jackson said. “I’m going to sell that place. You know I don’t want to live there. I’ll split the money with you and Maureen, fair’s fair.”

“No, you keep the money,” his father said. “I have no need for it. Be a good start for you, Jackson. Buy your own place wherever you want. Might have a boy of your own soon enough.”

And he looked from Jackson to me, as if it was all already foretold. The son we would have, tall and hard eyed and hard headed like those before him, another to add to this lineage.  

I stepped down onto the grass and looked up at the hills, and thought of the boy out there, dead or grown, lost to his family either way.