Riggs Crossing (7 page)

Chapter 20

I come back to the Refuge the back way, through the yard that has an old-fashioned gazebo that no one uses. Except today it is being used, by Bindi and a large, angry woman with masses of frizzy dark hair and a face like a bulldog.

It’s Bindi’s mother.

Normally Bindi glares at me whenever I pass her. Today, she’s too busy glaring at her mother to even notice me walk past. Bindi’s mother is hammering away at her with angry questions. ‘So, what are you gonna do?’ the woman barks. Bindi says nothing. ‘Answer me!’ Bindi’s mother insists, her voice getting louder. ‘Are you coming home or not?’ Bindi is sitting with her arms tightly crossed and her mouth clamped shut. Only her bowed shoulders give her away – she’s afraid of her mother.

I keep on walking. I’ve just about made it to the back door when all hell breaks loose.

‘You little slut! You’ve always been a little slut!’ Bindi’s mother is screaming, then she and Bindi are fighting and clawing like two cats.

‘Bindi! Mrs Peters!’ Lyyssa cries and comes running from the kitchen, where she was hovering during this attempted mother/daughter reunion that was doomed before it even started. She doesn’t get to the gazebo in time to keep Bindi’s mum from landing a punch to Bindi’s mouth, or keep Bindi from tearing out a fistful of her mother’s black hair. I beat it back to my room, without even stopping in the kitchen for a glass of Milo. I want to keep out of the way until everything cools down.

I hear Mrs Peters roar off in whatever rust-bucket of a car brought her here. I hear Lyyssa try to be soothing and Bindi yelling, ‘Leave me alone, bitch!’ I hear Lyyssa sigh, or at least I imagine I do. I can tell by the noise of the door closing that she’s retreated to her office. She can’t change what just happened, but she can write a report about it and put it in Bindi’s file.

I wait for about fifteen minutes, then I figure it’s safe to go to the kitchen. On my way I pass the door to the bathroom, which is slightly ajar. And I stop dead in my tracks. Bindi is standing in front of the mirror, frantically plucking her eyebrows with tweezers. Except she’s gone too far, and plucked her eyebrows out of existence. Now she has two reddened, puffy arches above her eyes. Her lip is swelling up where her mother split it open.

‘You need some ice,’ I say without thinking. Bindi’s head snaps around, and in an instant she’s pulled me into the bathroom and pinned me against the wall.

‘You know what this is, runt?’ Bindi puts her thumb on the inside of my forearm and presses, sending a flash of pain right to the bone. ‘That’s a pressure point,’ she hisses, pressing even harder. I whimper and my knees give way. ‘My boyfriend taught me how to kill people. I can kill you if I want.’ Bindi lets me slide to the floor and walks out. I put my head against the cool tile floor and cry.

Chapter 21

The bruise on my arm is fading, but I can’t stop thinking about Bindi and her awful mother. And Bindi’s been watching me lately, watching me with narrowed eyes that seem to have turned an even more poisonous shade of green. It makes me more nervous than when she was being openly nasty to me.

I think she wants to kill me. She’s trying to figure out how she can do it without getting caught.

What I need is something I can use against Bindi. A really nasty secret. Something that I can tell everyone about if she doesn’t leave me alone. And as I’m tracing the fading outline of the yellowing bruise, I realise I know where to find what I need.

I keep myself awake until 2 am, when I’m sure that everyone will be asleep. I take my penlight from my desk, quietly leave my room and go to the kitchen, where I find a knife and a screwdriver. Then I make my way to the back wing where Lyyssa’s office is, where all of our secrets are kept.

The door, of course, is locked.

I hear Daddy’s voice in the back of my mind. ‘What a loser,’ the voice says. ‘Does he think this Mickey Mouse lock is going to keep anyone out? Picking this kind of lock is easier than opening a bottle of Carlton Cold.’

I use the knife and the screwdriver to work the door open. I step inside the room and close the door softly behind me, then wait for a few minutes to allow my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Fortunately, there are no curtains on the windows and enough light comes in from the street. I look at the filing cabinet in the corner. In the top right-hand corner, a tiny silver key rests in the lock. Lyyssa hasn’t even thought to take the key with her. Careful not to bump into any furniture, I cross the room and pull open the middle drawer.

D, E, F. I finger through the alphabet. I catch a phrase here and there from someone’s file, from kids who used to live here. Obviously, they never throw anything out.

 . . . drop in the frequency of urges to check. His score on the Maudesley Obsessive Compulsive Inventory (MOCI) fell from 19 (pre–treatment) to 6 (post–treatment). At a six month follow–up session, Anthony reported that although he will still have a passing urge to check that the door is locked, he can easily resist it and most of the time he doesn’t even think of checking things twice anymore.

Whatever. So that kid liked to make sure the door was locked, so what? I hope Bindi’s file is more interesting.

I keep flipping through the files. G, H, I, J, K. Kunkle, Karen Louise.

Case Summary

Karen Louise Kunkle

I never thought to ask Karen’s last name. ‘Kunkle’ sounds exactly like Karen: fat, clumsy and stupid.

Ten-year-old female, eldest of three children, obese and suffering from diabetes insipidus, which causes frequent urination if left untreated. Removed from her home after visit by DOCS caseworkers who were alerted by school authorities.

Karen’s mother, Gertrude Kunkle, is obese and developmentally disabled. Karen and her siblings are the result of consensual incest between Gertrude Kunkle and her own father. Karen’s father/grandfather, Clarence ‘Clarrie’ Kunkle, is mentally normal, though illiterate and pathologically shy. Karen’s grandmother is deceased.

Karen demonstrated poor academic performance at school, where she was also the victim of bullying because of her poor hygiene and local gossip surrounding the family. Karen was nicknamed ‘the piss girl’ by fellow students because the odour of urine clung to her. Ostracism and victimisation of Karen increased after she was rumoured to be the cause of an epidemic of head lice that swept the school. Fellow students called Karen ‘Lousie’, in a cruel misspelling of her middle name. Karen’s teacher became alarmed after seeing red welts on Karen’s arms. Karen’s mother, Gertrude, admitted to investigating DOCS officers that she had whipped Karen with a belt because she blamed her for bringing lice into the family home.

On inspecting the child’s home, investigating officers found conditions of nearly uncontrolled filth and disorder in every room except the kitchen. Karen’s mother was deemed neglectful for giving Karen her diabetes medication only erratically – Gertrude admitted to caseworkers that when the medicine ran out and the family had no money to buy more, Karen was simply kept home from school or sent to school wearing loose clothing and an improvised nappy.

Caseworkers also determined that the child slept in the same bed with her mother and her father/grandfather. No evidence suggested that Karen had been sexually abused, but she was deemed at risk of such abuse and removed from the home, along with her two younger siblings, who were successfully placed in long-term foster care.

Karen has a passive attitude, demonstrates flat affect and is socially unskilled – not surprising in light of her dysfunctional family background. School results and aptitude tests administered since Karen was taken into care show that her intelligence is in the lower end of the normal range.

Also notable is that Karen has not processed the concept of having any internal locus of control: she views herself as helpless, entirely at the mercy of external circumstances, and having no power to change her eating habits, grooming or behaviour.

Karen does not understand that she and her siblings are the product of incest, and seems unaware that the incest taboo is one of the reasons for the ostracism she suffered in her home community. Karen regards the severe bullying she endured as a normal manifestation of the hostile world outside the home, not as a phenomenon caused by her and her family’s inability to conform to social mores.

Rorschach and other tests reveal an obsession with food and television, which Karen views as the only reliable sources of comfort and reassurance. The one unifying activity engaged in by this family was the preparation, cooking, and eating of meals, in which all family members took part. After meals, the family watched television. Food was usually nutritious, but also high-fat, high-calorie, and eaten in binge quantities.

Karen remains at the Inner West Youth Refuge pending a decision by the Family Court about whether she may be returned to her mother’s custody. As Gertrude Kunkle, since her relocation to a housing project in Goulburn, has drifted into alcoholism and promiscuity, this is seen as unlikely.

No wonder Karen’s such a drop-kick. Her whole family are fat overeaters, her mother’s a retarded slut, and her father is also her grandfather.

I yawn. But Karen isn’t the real reason I’m in Lyyssa’s office. I’m looking for Bindi’s file. I keep flicking through the alphabet. L, M, N, O, P.

Peters, Belinda
, typed on a label.
Bindi
, written alongside it in Lyyssa’s sloppy cursive writing. I take the file into a corner and click on my penlight.

I stop reading after a few minutes because I’ll vomit if I go on. I feel sick and polluted and ashamed of myself. My hands are shaking as I replace the folder.

I look at the rest of the files and slowly flick through them. P, Q, R. My fingers stop at R. No, I can’t look at my own file. There isn’t time. I have to get out of here.

I lock the cabinet and survey the room to make sure I left everything the way I found it. I creep back to my room and lock the door behind me. Then I check the door again to make sure I locked it. I try to sleep, but I keep seeing horrible pictures of a four-year-old Bindi screaming. Pictures of Bindi’s drunken mother turning up the TV so she wouldn’t hear, pretending not to know what her own husband was doing to her own daughter. I try to force the pictures out of my mind by thinking of Daddy. I don’t know my father’s name, or where he is now. But I do know what Daddy would do to Bindi’s rock-spider father if he ever met him.

Just before I finally manage to fall into an uneasy sleep, I wonder what was in my case file. Probably nothing interesting, just the medical stuff from the hospital. I bet my file is the slimmest one in the cabinet. After all, I haven’t told them anything.

Chapter 22

Incident Report – Inner West Youth Refuge

Officer – Lyyssa Morgan

At 8:00 am 8 June, Non-Resident Counsellor Sky Morningstar alerted me that the lock on the door of my office at the IWYR had been tampered with. On investigation, I discovered scrapes to the lock and to the surrounding woodwork, although the office was still locked. No other areas of the IWYR showed signs of forced entry, and none of the alarms covering the exits had sounded. Therefore, I believe that the person responsible for the break-in must be one of the juvenile residents at IWYR.

Nothing in my office was damaged, but the filing cabinet had been left unlocked. None of the files appeared missing, but two, those of Belinda Peters and Karen Kunkle, appeared to have been removed from the cabinet and replaced. No pages are missing from either file. There is a photocopier in my office, but an access code is required to operate it, so it is safe to assume that no sensitive information was copied.

It is verging on impossible that Karen Kunkle is the culprit, as she has neither the mechanical ability nor the initiative to accomplish such an act. In addition, Karen has shown no curiosity about the contents of her file.

Belinda Peters, by contrast, has extremely high intelligence and has in the past associated with criminals who may have taught her methods of breaking and entering. Recently, Belinda had an unpleasant visit with her biological mother that resulted in a physical altercation. Since that time, Belinda has exhibited anxiety and anger at the possibility of returning to her birth family.

As IWYR has a policy of openness, there was no need for Belinda to break into my office if she wished to view the contents of her file. Belinda is aware of this policy, but as her early life consisted of a brutal series of betrayals, Belinda may not have trusted me to honour it.

I consider that Belinda Peters was the most likely person responsible for the break-in, and that her probable motivation was to discover if DOCS and other authorities planned to return her to her birth family.

The motive for disturbing Karen Kunkle’s file is unclear. Although Belinda has behaved in a rude and bullying manner toward Karen Kunkle, her attitude is one of self-centred defensiveness and aggression. Belinda demonstrates no curiosity about Karen or any other IWYR residents, and I cannot imagine Belinda having any interest in viewing Karen’s file.

In the absence of definite proof that Belinda is responsible for the break-in, and in view of Belinda’s fragile emotional state, I have chosen not to mention the incident to her or other residents of IWYR.

A funding request has been submitted to pay for a more sophisticated lock on the office door.

Chapter 23

For a couple of days I had what Clarissa Hobbs would call a moral dilemma. It’s wrong to invade people’s privacy. It’s unethical to blackmail people by threatening to reveal damaging information. But on the other hand, I had every right to threaten Bindi with revealing her terrible secret, because if I didn’t, Bindi would go ahead and kill me.

But a couple of days after I broke into Lyyssa’s office, Bindi disappeared, and my moral dilemma disappeared along with her.

At first I worried for my own sake. Maybe Bindi was just getting me to drop my guard so she could come back in the middle of the night and slit my throat. Then I started to worry for Bindi’s sake. Maybe she was on the street somewhere, knocking around with people who are worse arseholes than her mother and father. And then I stopped thinking about her much at all.

Lyyssa and Sky Morningstar tried to have one of their stupid ‘rap sessions’, where we were supposed to talk about how we felt about Bindi being gone, but no one wanted to say anything.

The only person who really cares is Cinnamon. Now she shuffles around with slumped shoulders and dull eyes, hardly says anything, and mumbles a reply if anyone speaks to her. Her sessions with Lyyssa must be even more excruciating than mine.

It’s not just that Cinnamon misses her friend, it’s that she has no personality of her own. Cinnamon is a follower, a hanger-on. She needs someone to tell her what to think and how to act. She was only ever nasty to me because Bindi was, not because she had any problem with me. In a way, I dislike her more than I ever disliked Bindi. At least Bindi made up her own mind about who she liked and didn’t like.

Today, I’m making a vegetable stir-fry. The recipe calls for a wok, but we don’t have one, so I’m using a plain old frying pan. I’m doing more cooking since Bindi isn’t around, now that I don’t have to schedule my kitchen time according to when she’s is likely to come in and make trouble for me.

I make enough for two serves. One bowl I cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge. I take a hair from my head and fold it into where the plastic wrap clings to the bowl, so that I can tell if anyone’s tampered with it. What if Karen took off the plastic wrap and put her pissy-smelling finger into it? What if Bindi sneaked back and put poison into it? I’m not worried about anyone eating it, though. I must be the only person in the house except Lyyssa and Sky who actually likes vegetables.

The other bowl of stir-fry I take to the dining room and eat. I’ve just sat down at the dining table, at my usual place even though there’s nothing to stop me from sitting at the head of the table or anywhere else, when I hear Lyyssa’s voice coming from down the hall. She’s in her office, talking on the phone with the door closed. I can barely hear what she’s saying, but there’s something about her tone of voice that makes me want to listen. I look down at my food. It’s still steaming hot. I decide to eavesdrop on Lyyssa for a little while.

‘But you said you were going to tell her last weekend!’ Lyyssa cries. Silence for a minute or so, with Lyyssa making little noises of protest. ‘Daniel, this isn’t fair, not to me, and not to Bronwyn. You’ve got to tell her about us.’

A light bulb goes off above my head, just like in a cartoon. I get the picture. Poor stupid Lyyssa. As if a shelter full of problem kids isn’t enough for her to deal with, she has to go and start a romance with somebody who’s already taken. I start eating, catching just a phrase here and there about ‘relationships’ and ‘agreements’ and ‘promises’. I finish eating and take my dirty dishes back to the kitchen to wash up. Lyyssa’s always lecturing us kids about ‘self-defeating behaviour cycles’. It sounds like she actually knows what she’s talking about, for a change. But if Lyyssa can’t stop herself from bonking a married man, how are the rest of us supposed to stop doing whatever it is we’re not supposed to be doing?

I wash my dishes and put them away. Lyyssa is still talking on the phone as I leave the kitchen. ‘So, next weekend, then?’ she says, in a hopeful tone. Is next weekend a Mrs Rowles weekend? Lyyssa is probably planning a weekend away with Dickweed Daniel.

I climb the stairs to my room. Lyyssa can’t work it out that getting a good screw isn’t worth being screwed over. Hey, that’s pretty clever, I think, as I open the door to my room. A good screw isn’t worth being screwed over. That’s really good. I’m proud of myself for thinking that up. Too bad I’ve got no one to share it with.