Billy. Going where darkness fears to tread…. Colin David Palmer

was on a hiding to nowhere really. He sees Billy for the first time in over four years and accepts him back as if he’d only gone yesterday. Four years without a phone call, a letter or any other bloody thing, and there were no recriminations, no aggro, nothing but acceptance. It was almost the welcoming back of the prodigal son and that’s probably what stopped Billy from going off again, after the shock about Jen. Billy felt obligated to stay.

      Perhaps before, when he really was a fifteen-year-old kid, Billy wouldn’t have felt the same. Coming to terms with the fact that he was suddenly a twenty year old, an adult, he knew there was a certain way adults are supposed to act. His composure and maturity as a teen stood him in good stead.

      Apart from the obvious, like the Ten Commandments, there are the unwritten rules of Life that most people follow and try to engender into their offspring. Not that Billy learnt much like that from his parents. Excuses, excuses, fucking wimp. This moron couldn’t find his way to his own shithouse if he had the worst case of diarrhea imaginable. It’s all bullshit. Yes, bullshit! Duran is the Angel and Girangar will lead us to the new world. So stick your fucking heads down between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye, because we’re coming to get you. And we will. You can’t hide, so there’s no need to panic. Just go. That’s right, go. Ha, go fuck yourself!

      Tony was a true friend. After dropping the bombshell about Jen he helped pick Billy up and put him on the road to recovery, so to speak. More or less, that’s what he did. He took Billy home with him, set up the spare bed in his room and that’s where Billy lived from then on. Tony’s parents were cool about it, they were pretty laid back sort of people. They’d always liked Billy and his steadying influence on Tony. Especially after the debacle with their eldest son, who had served his prison term for drug dealing only to get out and re-offend within two weeks, while he was still on probation! Once a fool always a fool, eh!

      Tony’s parents even rang the Gold Coast Police and made sure that everything was hunky dory with them, that Billy wasn’t actually wanted for anything. The gist of their response was that a missing person case was the last thing they were worried about, and seeing as he was no longer in Queensland it was out of their jurisdiction anyway. Billy hadn’t expected to make the Top 10 Wanted List or anything but he had been hoping for maybe a couple of answers. At least he was in the clear so to speak.

      It took a fair while to get over the shock of Jen. Tony couldn’t understand. It had been four years for him, but only four months for Billy. Billy and Jen had truthfully believed, like so many fifteen year olds do, that they had been meant for each other.

      Billy learnt the hard way to embrace and recognise fate otherwise Life is a constant compromise. He knew his Life was different, that he was different. He had grown up alone with that knowledge. Alone except for the guys from the other side. He supposed he was a hypocrite because of what he did, leaving Jen and his Mum. But he felt he hadn’t left them, just went away for a short time to grieve and recuperate. His intention had always been to return. He really believed that she would be there waiting when he came back. He missed her. He continued to grieve for her.

      He felt guilty too. If he hadn’t gone away maybe she would be alive today. Billy thought of this often. If that was her fate, to die horribly like that, perhaps that could have been him, you know, the guy with Jen that got decapitated? But Billy knew it wasn’t so.

      Billy only knew his destiny did not lie in Life. It wasn’t apparent to him how he knew, he just did. He had to live his Life first to find out. He lay in some sort of middle zone, the only one there that anybody knew about anyway. He was both alive, and not. He is neither here nor over there. He can go here, and there – whenever he liked! But he had to finish his business here before he can find out what is there. Billy was a kid when he began shouldering that knowledge, and to have remained relatively normal to those around him was testimony to his insight and ability. He’s not a kid anymore, or normal. But he was when he digested that much about himself. And as for normal, well, that’s for each individual to decide.

      So here he is living with Tony and his parents now. It’s been several weeks and Billy still feels so hollow inside. It’s the most ‘human’ he’d ever felt. Thankfully, the involuntary tears and sobbing had all but disappeared. He had found that embarrassing after awhile. Jen had been the only one to ever see him cry before and that time had been from happiness. Billy learnt a lot about emotion from the past few weeks, that’s for sure. He had felt and observed enough before so that he could have known, but the grief about his Dad was nothing compared to this. Even having seen more death than anybody can ever imagine. Seen it every single bloody day, almost every minute of every frigging day in fact, in the presence of the transits. But now it was up close and personal, he knew what it really felt like. And wished he hadn’t found out.

      Billy soldiered on and Tony got him going to the jam sessions again. They all wanted him to actually sing in the band. In the back of his mind though was his one and only public performance, with Mr Cocker no less. He still thought if he hadn’t gone there, to the Top Pub that night, or to tennis, or Tonys’, or to the drive in, that he might have been able to save his Dads’ Life. And because it was his Dad, family, blood, maybe he could have done something this time.

      A minor ‘problem’ at home was that Billy’s Mum and Dad knew about him and some of his abilities. His Mum accepted it, recognised it for what it was and let him be, but his Dad, no way! To his Dad Billy was a freak and he refused to accept it. Billy even stood in front of him one night and went off then came back, right before his very eyes, which isn’t a bad trick for a four year old! He tried to convince him for so long, even telling him about events to come, sad events, and they always came true but still he refused to listen or accept. What he did do though was to start sitting in front of that television as his escape from his spooky kid. Everyone must learn to accept Reality, and to make the most of whatever fate deals you. Billy knew that very few made it. His Dad didn’t.

      Billy and Tony lived in a little town about ten kilometres south of Ballina named Wardell. So he and Tony were not being lazy by catching a bus to school. Billy wondered how he would have gone if he had finished school? Billy lived in town itself. Tony’s house was about half a kilometre away, just past the outskirts. Tony’s parents had a few acres they grew pineapples on which is probably where his big brother got his horticultural skills! Jen used to live on the other side of town, about two kilometres away on the back road to Lismore. Her Father bought the school bus run from Wardell to Lismore, which is how they ended up moving here.