Free The Beauty Is in the Walking by James Moloney Page A

his sister in the school yard in case she talked to guys like me. I hadn’t been entirely convinced by what Soraya told me and in the days since I’d squibbed on talking to Dan about it.
    Now I was staring straight into Mahmoud’s face in that wordless way that communicates at a different level. There was a strength in it I should have expected, I suppose, after he’d taken on the mob so manfully, but strength wasn’t the right word. He had something in him I knew from a more familiar face – my brother’s – and the connection made me search deeper, into the part of him that would always do the things expected of him, the part that acted by what he believed in. They were the qualities in Tyke that made me want to be like him and they lived in this boy, too.
    â€˜Come on, Jacob. It’s time I got you home,’ said Mum, tugging at my elbow and since the moment had passed I shuffled off beside her. In the car, there was no school principal to make Mum worry about the niceties. ‘Jacob, what in God’s name were you up to? You knew you’d be knocked over. They could have trampled you half to death.’ She finished off with something mothers love tosmack you with. ‘And where would I be then, if you were killed in a playground fight?’
    â€˜With no one to watch out for all the time,’ I said, not meaning anything by it, but she didn’t take it that way.
    â€˜Do you think I care about how much I do for you, how much I worry about you? You are part of my life, and I wouldn’t trade your CP for a dozen able-bodied children.’
    Jesus, I would.
    An hour later, my entire group turned up at home, absolutely stoked.
    â€˜Jacob, you bloody champion. Amy’s told us all about it,’ said Dan who led the way.
    I’d never seen him like this, not about anything I’d done. Mitch and he were a tag team and if they didn’t quite pat me on the back, the effect was the same. ‘How many of them were there, again?’ asked Dan. He wasn’t asking me.
    â€˜Seven,’ said Amy.
    â€˜Seven with one blow,’ cried Mitch, quoting the fairytale Mrs de Marco read us in primary.
    â€˜I only tangled with one. Sort of tackled him, that’s all. You’re exaggerating.’
    They knew it, but it didn’t matter because this was my day and they were determined to celebrate it with me. Amy was behind the whole thing, I suspected, and I sent an accusing smirk her way which made her laugh. I hadn’t seen her so bright-eyed before, or maybe it was because those eyes had never been focused on me.
    â€˜I saw everything,’ she told the others, surely not for the first time, and challenged me to shut her up, while hovering in the background I saw my mother switch between proud grins and a furrowed brow.
    The whole thing was blowing up like a balloon and it was fun like I’d never had before, especially when I couldn’t buy that sort of connection to Amy with a planet of gold. They were barely gone when Dad turned up – on a Friday! – his drinks-with-his-mates night which usually became a counter meal and a few more beers in front of whatever Fox Sports was dishing up on the pub’s big screen. He was all over me like a rash, but at least he cut through the cripple-caution and all Mum’s talk of recklessness. ‘Gutsy stuff, Jacob. I’m proud of you.’
    I tried to remember if he’d ever said those words to me. His pride in Tyke was naked and boisterous, where with me it was a touch on my shoulder or a hug when I’d been younger. He was a very gentle man for a guy who talked up the footy and car racing and the rest. You’ve done well there, Jake , he’d say about some picture I’d drawn or the way I’d stuck it out through physio, which could be damned painful.
    â€˜Dad, I didn’t do much. Mahmoud fought them off himself and then Mr Lambert came. That’s