"‘What if I told you that I lied that day on the platform?’ he says after a moment.
‘You’re lying now.,’ I say angrily. ‘Don’t you dare try to get out of the fact that you were missing your mother and brother and you wanted to see them. You were a mess. I was there, remember?’
He shakes his head. ‘I lied.’
‘Am I supposed to think you’re all tough because you don’t need people, Griggs? Is that what you’re trying to do here?’
‘No, that’s your thing.’
‘Then stop lying, and admit you were there because you missed your family.’
‘I’ve missed my mother and brother every day that I’ve been out here this time round. But not that day.’
There is something in his eyes that frightens the hell out of me and I want to walk away. I don’t want to hear another word because I know that whatever he has to say is going to destroy a part of me.
‘I knew who you were before that day,’ he says. ‘Some morbid prick pointed you out to me in the street when I arrived here that first year. Told me how some Hermit had whispered something in your ear and then blown his brains out.’
The words are brutal. I’ve never really heard it described that way. I block my ears for a moment, but when you block your ears you tend to close your eyes and when I close my eyes I see blood and brain-matter and I smell the sickly scent of blood.
‘So you were at the train station and saw me come along and you thought I’d be a fun person to hang out with for a weekend?’ I say snidely. ‘And you made up some story about wanting to see you mother and brother.’
‘No, I was waiting for the train. The three forty-seven to Yass. Comes every afternoon and, according to the station mast, it’s never late and I knew that. And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. My mum wouldn’t. She told me later that she couldn’t, because she was scared to see that I might hate her. She feels like she didn’t protect me from him. But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can’t do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.’
‘Do what to me? I don’t think that leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs,’ I lie.
‘You being on that platform changed mine.’
This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.
‘I wasn’t there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass,’ he says. ‘I was there to throw myself in front of it.’"

"‘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, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangir-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 “What’s 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 called Fitz came riding along 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 Jellicoe Road like they’re some kind of garbage, don’t you know?
‘Wonder dies.’"