Are You Seeing Me? (20 page)

3 April 2008

I’m sorry if this is hard to read. The numbness in my fingers is making it tough to write without it looking like a mess of chicken scratches. It won’t stop me doing your journal though. I promised I’d do it right up to your and Perry’s eighteenth birthdays, and nothing—not cancer or chemo or numbness or nausea or fevers or kidneys being on the fritz or losing weight like a jockey or bloody World War Three starting up—is gonna get in the way. Not with a mere six months to go until the big one-eight.

I’m not much into religion, Jus, but I’ve been trying to convince God that He should throw a miracle our way. Mainly at night, I’ve been chatting with Him. I hope you don’t mind—I’ve been using you as the big guns in my argument. I said it was pretty poor form for Him to give you such a dud hand. A teenager having to defer uni to care for her terminal old man and her disabled brother… How can He justify that? And then there’s the fact that you do everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—without a sigh or a sullen look or a single complaint. Without a split second’s thought for yourself. Why would He treat you so badly? Why would He punish one of His most beautiful angels?

I haven’t even mentioned how your mother skipped town. Might add that one to the plea bargaining tonight. You asked awhile back if I should get in contact with your mother to let her know what’s going on. My answer is still the same: What’s the point? She hasn’t dropped a line or sent a postcard or even requested to become a bloody Facebook friend in the fourteen years since she took off. Why would she want to be in contact now? Because I’m dying? She probably thinks I had it coming. No, I see no need to reach out to someone who walked away without the slightest peek over her shoulder. Unless, of course, she’s been belted with the generosity bat and would like to donate her pancreas, spleen, liver, lungs, etc., to a good and worthy cause.

I CAN SEE IT.

Screaming and flailing. Punching my head, kicking the wall. I don’t mean to be violent. I don’t want to be out of control. It just happens. And I’m hardly aware it is happening. That’s because my mind has gotten smaller, lost a few of its other functions. It’s gone into fight-or-flight mode, as if I’m a caveman confronted by an earthquake or a dinosaur attack. Actually, some scientists call it the reptilian brain response. But I’m too young to know any of that. I’m only four years old.

I’m in the middle of the floor now, standing on my toes. There are blood-smeared tissues lying all around. And one in Mum’s hand. She’s holding it up to her eyebrow. I can see she has two purple bruises on her arms. She has a big purple-yellow one on her calf too. They look like they were drawn on with markers; I sometimes do that on my own skin. And the walls. And the clothes in the laundry basket.

She leaps forward and wraps her arms around me. I scream and throw my head back. We twist and stumble, headed for the floor. Then my arm is free, out of her hold. I swing and hit Mum on the side of the face. My eyes dim. Static fills my ears. Slowly, the reptilian brain begins to crawl away. I feel the floor under my hip and shoulder. And I feel Mum’s body behind me. And her arms across my chest. I stare at the fingertips of my right hand before reaching back to touch her cheek. It has a long scratch on it. If I knew anything about quakes and plates and fissures, I might imagine it as a fault line. I don’t.

I’m only four years old.

WE PASS THROUGH THE TURNSTILES at ten o’clock. I look around and right away I feel less anxious. Just as Leonie said, the PNE is very similar to the Ekka in Brisbane. The rides, the food, the crowd. The dirty people who are in charge of the attractions—the people Just Jeans calls Carnie Schwarzeneggers. One thing about the PNE is different though: the old Wooden Roller Coaster. It is the reason I have excitement as well as anxiety. As we pass by a group of pale teenagers talking about the Zipper, I decide to share some of my recent research findings with Leonie.

“The Coaster was built in 1958 and is made of Douglas fir. It has a top speed of nearly eighty kilometers per hour. It was in two movies—neither of them was very good and Jackie Chan wasn’t in them. I don’t think there have been any major accidents, not like the Timber Wolf ride in Kansas City, America, where a small girl was thrown out of the cars and died.”

“Would you like to go for a ride?”

“Yes, I certainly would.”

I have three turns on the Coaster, one straight after another. Each time, I have to wait patiently in line and listen to the Carnie Schwarzenegger’s instructions about keeping my arms inside the car. But then during the ride—particularly the big drops—everyone lifts their arms up and screams. So I do it too, so I don’t come across as a weirdo. And when I come back to the Carnie Schwarzenegger, I apologize for not following his instructions. He chews his gum and repeats the same things he told me before.

“How did you like that, eh?” asks Leonie when I return.

“I didn’t get thrown out.”

“That’s good. You looked great up there. Just one of the gang.”

“No one else was saying
pranayama
when it was over.”

Following the Coaster, I have rides on the Enterprise, the Pirate Ship and the Hellavator. When we arrive at the Westcoast Wheel, I ask Leonie if she would like to join me. At first she says no, but when I’m almost at the front of the line she changes her mind. Two minutes later, we are suspended high above the PNE, the two of us together in a cage, defying gravity, looking out over a city that doesn’t know it is being watched.

“ARE YOU AFRAID OF EARTHQUAKES, LEONIE?”

“A little. Probably no more than the average person living in this city, I would say.”

“No lie, seismologists believe there’s a 37 percent chance of an 8.2-plus event and a 10 to 15 percent chance of a 9.0-plus event in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the next fifty years.”

“And what does Extrasensory Perry believe?”

I shrug. “I can never be sure whether something will happen or not. Nobody can, not even the best seismologists. I know one thing definitely, though: if it happens, living in a world of one is not an option. People will need each other.”

On the ground, I notice a man in a wheelchair on the path below the West Coast Wheel. An overweight woman pushes the chair with one hand; the other hand shoves a melting ice-cream cone into her mouth. When they reach the end of the path, the woman loses her grip. The chair hits a metal garbage bin, and the man gets thrown forward like a crash-test dummy. He groans and a long line of drool hangs out of his mouth.

“Whoops!” says the woman, pulling the chair free and keeping the ice cream away from the spazzing man. I watch until they disappear into the crowd.

“Is a fear of earthquakes one of the reasons you’d like to come back to Brisbane?” I ask.

“No, that hasn’t really entered into my thinking.”

“Brisbane is a good choice. Brisbane doesn’t have fault lines like here.”

“I’ve got one reason for coming back, Perry. Well, two, in fact.”

“I think it would be difficult living on a fault line.”

“Lots of people choose to,” Leonie replies. “They accept it.”

“Some don’t. Some move away.”

The wheel shifts for the third time on our ride. It is our turn to go to the very top. There is a large bird—maybe a hawk or a bald eagle—flying in the distance, making figure eights above the houses. It looks similar to the one Ogopogo was watching at the lake. I wait for the cage to stop rocking before I speak again.

“Where did you go after leaving our family?”

Leonie sits up straighter and uncrosses her feet. She grabs hold of the nearest bar in our cage. “I, uh…I lived with my mother—your grandmother—and my stepfather in Cairns. She wasn’t too happy with me being there and you guys being back in Brisbane. We argued a lot. I moved out after about nine months.”

“Is my grandmother still alive?”

“No, she died toward the end of 1995.”

“Just Jeans and I were maybe five. Did we ever meet her?”

Leonie closes her eyes for an instant. She swallows, and it sounds like there is glue in her mouth. “Yes, a few times. When you were little.”

“I don’t remember her.”

“She loved you two. She didn’t spend as much time with you as she should’ve. I’m to blame for that.”

I move my head from side to side. Then I take the seismometer from my pack and place it on the seat. The Westcoast Wheel’s clunky motor kicks in again. Our cage starts steadily arcing back down to earth.

“Do you need to smoke a cigarette, Leonie?”

“I’m okay.”

“I don’t like cigarette smoke. It chokes my throat and my skin. And it dries out my eyes. But we are outside, so it won’t affect me much.”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“So, you’re not addicted to smoking?”

“No, I’m not addicted, Perry. I’ve quit lots of times.”

I nod as we reach the ground and come to a stop. “You don’t have to quit again because of me.”

WE ARE SEATED ON A bench near the bumper cars, eating lunch. I’ve got chicken strips and chips. Leonie has a burger. She throws it in the bin after two bites.

“When did you leave Australia?” I ask.

“After my mother died.”

“Where did you go?”

“I backpacked around Europe, South America, parts of Asia. I ended up in India, living in an ashram.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a quiet place away from the world, where you can study and pray and meditate.”

“And do yoga?”

“Yes. I learned yoga and how to teach it in the ashram.”

I tap the seismometer with my fingernail. The
plink, plink
sound it makes—it resembles dripping water.

“And then you went to Canada?”

“Yes,” she says. “I came here after India. My biological father was Canadian. I’d never met him, so I thought it was about time I did.”

“Did you live with him too?”

“No. It took me a long time—almost a year—to find him. He worked in the Alberta oil fields and on the ice-fishing boats that go to Alaska. I managed to meet up with him in a town called Red Deer. It was brief, awkward. He barely remembered Mum. At the end, he shook my hand, thanked me for tracking him down. He said he would try to keep in touch, but I knew it was a lie. I haven’t heard from him since.” She shrugs. “He wasn’t cut out to be a parent. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

I don’t know how to answer that, so I scrunch my face and make some popping sounds. Then, after thirty seconds, I rock back and forth. Leonie asks if I’m okay. My eyes spring open and the next question pours out of my mouth like lava from the vent of a volcano. “How long after meeting your biological father did you write to Just Jeans?”

“Two weeks.”

I nod three times. Leonie gets a look on her face that I can’t properly read.

“Did you see that before I told you?” she asks.

“See?”

“Did you know that fact before I told you?”

“I knew you probably would’ve written soon after. It’s a logical conclusion.” I shift the seismometer to my lap. “Did you ever think about writing a letter before that time?”

Leonie leans forward, elbows on her knees. Her hair blocks her face. It looks like a small gray-streaked curtain has been lowered down over her eyes. “I thought about writing or phoning or getting in touch years before I did, but I never got beyond thinking about it. I couldn’t find the words. Every sentence seemed like an insult or an excuse or a sick joke. The more time passed, the more I felt like there was no way back. And that was fitting. You guys were better off without me.” She touches the front of her throat. Perhaps she has some burger stuck there. “When I met my dad, I realized I was different from him—I cared. I was a disgrace and unworthy of forgiveness, but I cared. So I bought a birthday card, wrote in it and put it in the post before I had a chance to lose my nerve.”

I push my fists into my ears and jump to my feet. I lift the seismometer from the bench and place it under my nose. “Can you hold this for me, please?”

She brings a hand up to her forehead to shield the sun.

“I would like to go on the Crazy Beach Party ride. My brain is getting packed too tight—no lie, it needs to loosen up. Can you hold my seismometer for me, please?”

After a four-second delay, she stands.

“No, no! I need to go by myself.” I move the seismometer to the crook of my left elbow and pat her shoulder with my free hand. “Please sit down.”

She obeys and takes the seismometer.

“One ride will be enough. I’ll be back before you can say, ‘Ogopogo was here.’ Promise.”

Then I go on the Crazy Beach Party ride.

Twice.

Just to make sure.