Smashed (11 page)

Exhaustion takes over from the frantic sense of disbelief that’s kept me going until now, and all these thoughts mix into a thick, congealed soup inside my head. It’s too hard to separate logic back out, and I drift off into a bleak, blank sleep.

I’m awoken by a rattling at the door and quickly straighten myself up, wiping at my nose and eyes, just as the old policeman looks inside. ‘Come on, Mr Young. Time to go.’ He hands me a sheet of paper and points to the instructions on the middle page. ‘You’re to be at the District Court at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, sharp. Don’t be late.’ Then he leads me out along the corridor and through a set of swinging doors.

Mum is here, hunkered down in a hard chair, looking absolutely shot. And Rita’s here too, her eyes enormous
and red-rimmed. Mum stiffly rises from her chair and hugs me, but I shrug her off, desperate just to get out of here.

‘Let’s go.’ I make for what is obviously the exit and don’t even check whether they’re following me until I reach the footpath. After the silence of the cell the world out here seems hellishly loud, with traffic whizzing past and blaring horns. I realise this must be the evening rush, which means poor Mum’s been hanging around in there for hours. I turn to her then, aware of the latticework of lines around her eyes. ‘Thanks for waiting.’

‘No probs.’ Her laugh sounds hollow, and she rubs her face. Then she flicks her mobile phone open and calls up Dad. ‘We’re ready now … yeah, outside.’ She smiles wanly as she listens, chewing at her bottom lip. ‘Love you too … Okay. Bye.’ She turns to me. ‘How about we pick up fish and chips on our way home?’

It sounds so reassuring, I’m afraid to speak, and have to swallow down the howling little wimp-boy part of me who’s trapped inside and beating at my vocal chords to be let out.

Rita must be reading what’s going on inside me, cos she shuffles up and slips her cold hand into mine. ‘It’ll be okay, Toby … Mum and Dad will sort it out.’

It’s funny how this one statement underlines the difference three years of age makes. I didn’t really notice
it until now. Before, I’d always trust, like her, that Mum and Dad could put things right … but now I realise I am on my own. I’m seen as an adult now in the eyes of the law, and it doesn’t matter how useless or pathetic or immature I might feel inside — to the judge who’s going to take my case tomorrow, I am nothing but another troublesome delinquent on a busy day.

I’m not usually one for religious images, but as we sit around the table eating crumbed fish and chip butties all I can think about is that painting by Da Vinci of
The Last Supper
. The fact we’re eating bread and fish seems almost comical — the modern-day equivalent of loaves and fishes. Not that I know any real details about the whole story (given Mum’s well-developed Irish backlash against organised religion), but it’s amazing what I picked up when
The Da Vinci Code
came out.

It makes me wonder how Jesus must have felt — sitting there with his disciples trying to hold cheerful conversations when he knew already he was doomed. I mean, I’m confident I’m not going to be nailed to a cross and crucified, but I can’t stomach eating anything, so I reckon he was eating light. 

‘Sandra will meet us at the District Court at eight,’ Mum says. She must’ve spent the time waiting for me studying up on what the next few days could bring, cos she’s been talking me through everything since we got home. ‘That way she can go over the process with us before you appear.’

‘But that pathetic curfew means I’m not even supposed to leave the house till eight,’ I remind her.

‘You’ll be with us,’ Dad chips in. ‘I’m sure that’ll be okay. I …’

He’s about to say more, when the phone rings and we all jump like we’ve just reached the shock moment in a horror flick. I guess it’s a sign of how much our nerves are stretched.

Dad listens to the caller with a worried frown. ‘So what is his prognosis now?’ He sits down suddenly, and continues to frown as angry, waspish buzzing escapes from the receiver, though the words aren’t clear. I’m guessing that the call is something to do with Don.
Please, please don’t let him die
. Each of us, I realise, is staring intently at Dad’s face as he nods and listens and finally interrupts the caller with a ‘Thank you’ and hangs up.

He takes a moment to compose himself before he speaks. ‘That was Carol Donaldson. Don’s condition
suddenly deteriorated, so they rushed him into surgery, to take the pressure off his brain.’ He rubs his fisted knuckles into his eyes, leaving us to hold our breaths. ‘It went okay. He’s still alive.’

‘It was — nice — of her to call. How did she sound?’ Mum’s studying Dad’s reactions like she deconstructs an object she’s about to paint.

‘Exhausted,’ Dad replies. ‘Though I don’t think she was calling up just to be kind …’

A rattled silence descends across us all and I can imagine what the others are thinking from the awful realisation that’s swirling round inside my head.
If Don dies, the cops will charge me with manslaughter … or maybe worse
.

‘I’m sorry, okay?’ Rita leaps up from the table, sending the tomato sauce flying. She’s shaking, her face all red and blotchy and her eyes on fire. ‘This is all my fault.’ She turns to me. ‘I’ll go to court for you, Tobes — I’ll tell them what Don did to me.’ She doesn’t even give me a chance to respond, just starts whacking her hands onto her head — thwack, thwack in the shocked silence of the room — and she’s pummelling herself so hard the tears are streaming down her face.

Mum flies over to Rita, grabbing her hands. But she breaks free, sobbing and wailing like a fire engine, and
makes this flying dash straight for the door — up and out of here before any of us can stop her.

‘Rita —’ Mum yells after her, and starts to follow. But I pull her back.

‘I’ll go, Mum. Let me.’ I don’t even wait for her to respond — just leg it out the door as fast as I can manage, which is not that great considering I’ve eaten nothing all day besides those two little chocolate chip biscuits and a few hot chips.

I can’t immediately see Rita when I get outside, so run up to the gate and check both ways along the street. But she’s not there.
That’s good
, I think.
Perhaps it means she’s still around
. I do a hurried circuit of the property but there’s no sign of her. It’s only as I’m doing a second round that I hear something tinkling in Dad’s shed, and figure she must be in there.

She’s curled up in a little ball, inside Dad’s latest project, crying hard and rocking backwards and forwards on her knees. It’s like she’s put herself in jail, constrained inside the delicate silver strands of Dad’s crazy radiolarian cage. She’s doing something with her hands I can’t see, until I slip in through the welded web and squat down next to her.
Oh shit!
She’s got a piece of broken glass and has dragged it right across her wrist.

‘Rita — no!’ I snatch the glass out of her hand, cutting
my finger on the edge as I toss it right across the room. She hasn’t cut right through the skin, just left a
jagged-looking
scratch. But it’s so bloody terrifying, all I can think to stammer out is, ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘But I wanted him dead,’ she whispers. ‘I lay there one whole night and prayed he’d die … I didn’t know it would get blamed on you.’

‘That’s crazy, Rits.’

She shrugs. ‘Big surprise. I’m crazy.’

‘No.’
I’m in way over my head here
. ‘Look, just because you quite justifiably wanted Don punished, doesn’t mean you made it happen.’

‘But it did.’

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t —’

‘I said it, over and over, all that night.
I
said it, Toby.
Me
.’

‘That’s totally illogical! You can’t give someone brain damage just by wishing it.’

She squeezes both her eyes shut tight, tears leaking down her cheeks and forming a damp butterfly-shaped stain in the middle of her orange skirt. I slip my arm around her shoulders and just sit with her, watching how the moonlight filters in through the windows and polishes the silver strands of Dad’s work.
How can something so beautiful be so like a cage? A jail?
 

The thought that Rita tried to cut herself brings back the aching pain that ploughed into my chest when I first heard about her rape. It makes me hate Don all over again, even though he’s lying in that hospital bed and could well die. And it forces me to wonder if, in some weird way, Rita’s crazy outburst might be right — that the anger we all feel towards him transferred through space in charges like negative electricity, spinning off until it forcefully connected back to him. Mum believes that what we give out comes back to us three times over … maybe this is really true. But no, if that’s the case, the greedy corporate bosses of the world wouldn’t be sunbathing on their private yachts while kids in third-world countries mine their filthy toxic coal and live in dumps.

Genes again, they rule us all. All the top primates fighting for control and power over every other lowly sucker in the pack. And it’s a fight to the death, when someone challenges the next baboon up the rung … That’s why no one’s going to believe me when I say I didn’t attack Don. That kind of family-protection mode is seen as part of human nature, natural. It makes good sense.

Damn it, I must track down Carl.

W
hen I go to bed I’m sure I’ll stay awake all night, but my body has other plans and I fall asleep before I even have a chance to stew about my time in court. The next thing I know, I’m having one of those dreams that feels so real I’m trying to convince myself it’s just a dream but not believing it.

I’m in a shady black and white world, where the only touch of colour comes from blood-red puddles on the street. I’m trying to make my way down the street, but the strings attached to my arms and legs keep tangling with the strings of all the other puppet people walking past. We’ve all got this jerky weave on — our knees pulled up separately from our feet — and the only sound is the steady clomping of our shoes.

Then I realise the others aren’t just accidentally bumping into me. They’re purposely herding me towards a kind of elevated stage. At first I think maybe I’m going to see a play or a band, but now they’re pushing me up
there and I’m left to stand before the crowd. Everybody’s face is like a mask — just painted on — but there’s an awful growling, buzzing sound that builds into an angry rage.

Now up comes this Punch and Judy pair and I’m thinking everything will be alright — until they both start slapping at me with their wooden fists. There’s nothing I can do to stop this rain of blows — they’re grinning like two demons. The crowd is chanting ‘Kill him’ as they hack their way through all my strings. This leaves me powerless to fight. Instead, as each string snaps and falls, I’m sinking down. Now the crowd begins to rush onto the stage. I’m drowning — trampled beneath a stamping, booting, kicking, jerking sea of feet …

I wake up with a start and check my clock. 4.52. If I can’t get back to sleep I’ll …

The next thing I register is Mum shaking me awake. ‘It’s seven o’clock, mate. Best you get up.’

Dad’s already at the table reading through the morning paper. I’m about to join him with a plate of toast when he groans and tries to turn the page quickly — though not before I read the headline:
Arrest made in assault case
. I can’t believe it — there’s a whole article about the attack on Don, with the cops quoted as calling it a ‘brutal act’. Thank god they haven’t named me, but
I guess that’ll be the next ordeal, if the lawyer fails to suppress it. I push my plate of toast away. I know I should eat breakfast, but my appetite has gone to hell.

Sandra meets us at the District Court. The whole place has a run-down, slightly grubby feel, and the room she takes us off to smells like rancid, week-old pies. ‘This is just a formality,’ she says. ‘We tell the court you’re pleading not guilty, request name suppression and ask that your bail is continued.’

‘You mean they might not let me go back home?’

‘We’re going to push for bail — given the extenuating circumstances, and the fact that Maeve and Paul will vouch for you.’ She nods at Mum and Dad, and they try to look reassuring. I’m not convinced.

Dad’s dressed in his best suit and made me wear the runner-up. I look like a small Asian drug dealer, with the suit sleeves tucked under at the cuffs and one of Dad’s psychedelic hippie ties. All I really need to complete the look is a pair of holographic sunnies and a weedy, pointed little mo. Dad never was much of a dresser — he has to wear a suit for work, but shows his disgust for fitting in by insisting on ties that range from bright fruit-inspired
patterns to neon-coloured cartoon prints. It marks him as eccentric, and now he’s passed this on to me. All I can hope is that the judge is colour blind, or is into bad taste.

Once we’re clear on what to do, we have to go back out into the corridor to wait until my case is called. The place is filling up now with the saddest bunch of losers you’ll ever see, from hung-over old derelicts and snarling street-kids to a woman with a girl around my age who looks about as scared as I am. She keeps peeking over in my direction, and I’m dying to know what she’s here for, though I’m buggered if I want her to know about
me
.

I remember when I was about eleven or twelve and I was first introduced to the concept of law and punishment. We had this debate at intermediate school where one of the kids suggested every criminal should be branded on their forehead so that everybody knew their crime. He reckoned it would mean that ‘normal’ people could avoid them, and they’d end up being desperate to clear their name. Maybe he thought that branding was as easy to remove as fake tattoos, I dunno. But even then I thought that labelling a person ‘good’ or ‘bad’ was just not smart. We all knew kids whose teachers labelled them as troublesome year after year — and it didn’t matter how hard they tried to be good, in the end they just gave up. They knew they’d get the blame for any trouble anyway.
A bit like Carl. Even when he
tries
not to be a psycho, no one believes him now — not even me.

The girl is called before me, and Mum pops her head through the doors as her charges are being read out to the judge. ‘Drunk driving,’ she reports, and I’m jealous, cos the worst she’ll get is six months without her licence and perhaps some kind of silly fine.

Meanwhile, Sandra thinks it’s reassuring to remind me that the charge I’m going up for has a maximum jail sentence of three years.

When the registrar calls my name, Dad takes me by the arm and walks beside me into court.

The judge does not even look up, just continues to look at her papers while the registrar directs me to the place I have to stand and reads out my name. I didn’t expect the judge to be a woman — I know that sounds sexist, and if I admitted this to Mum she’d clobber me, but it never even entered my head. The other thing that’s really weird is that this woman judge is quite young, and probably quite pretty for someone her age. She’s got one of those mouths that curls up at the edges like she’s always smiling — though there’s nothing to suggest a
smile in the look she gives me when the charge is read. Her blue eyes drive into my soul, and it’s easy to see why she’s a judge — nothing will escape
that
gaze.

The only thing I have to do is announce I’m pleading not guilty. The rest is up to Sandra, and she rattles off her arguments for bail and name suppression so efficiently it’s nothing like the courtroom scenes you see on TV — there’s no grand speech-making or clever tricks. The main point seems to be more about Mum and Dad than me — how respectable and upstanding they are, and how they’ll guarantee my good behaviour till the case is brought back to the court. There’s a bit where she goes on about my school history and how much damage my ‘promising career’ would suffer if my name got out into the press. I know she’s right — it would be hell — but mainly because it wouldn’t matter how many of my good friends I told the truth to, there’d be hundreds of others who’d believe my guilt just cos they read it in the papers or heard through some nosy, not-so-close ‘friend’.

Then the whole thing’s over and I’ve been remanded for a ‘status hearing’ in three weeks. The judge has granted both the bail and the name suppression. I automatically turn to Mum, who’s biting her lip and fighting back tears. Dad is holding her hand tightly, and he looks so pale it’s hard to tell he’s pure Chinese. 

I bet they wish I’d never been born.

We’re whisked away from the courtroom as the next case rolls in. It’s a conveyor belt of misery here, and everyone looks tired and strained.

Once Sandra tells us what we need to organise next, we’re free to go. You’ve no idea the relief I feel when I walk out through the doors into the sunny street off Lambton Quay. Fat pigeons line up along the wall beside a little grassy park, and across the road the Beehive dominates the skyline — with its hundreds of small windows facing out across the city to remind us that Big Brother is, indeed, watching.

I leave Mum and Dad to have a coffee and hike up the hill to uni, desperate to go to class and block all this other crap out of my head. It’s not going to be easy, though, because the first thing I have to do is grease up to my Psychology tutor about the missed exam. He’s not in his office so I chicken out and leave a note, begging reassessment on compassionate grounds. I’ll have to fill in all the details on an official form, so don’t even try to explain what’s going on right now — it’s just too hard.

I manage to make it to the rest of my lectures but, although it’s great being back on familiar turf, where no one knows me or gives a stuff about what I may or may not have done, I just can’t concentrate on what I’m
being taught. Around mid-afternoon I finally give up, and walk out in the middle of my Bio lab — something I’ve never done before. I’m swept by a wave of exhaustion so intense I can’t even face the walk back down the hill to town, so catch the bus.

While I’m waiting for it, I call up Carl. It’s just about to switch to answerphone when I hear his voice. ‘Howdy, stranger.’

‘It’s me … where are you?’

There’s a weird kind of pause before he speaks. ‘S’up?’

‘I really need to talk to you. Any chance that we could meet?’ I try to keep all the furious suspicion I’m feeling out of my voice.

‘I guess I could mosey on over to Newtown …’ He lets out this freaky giggle that’s so deranged and uncontrolled it morphs into a chesty cough.

‘I’m on my way there now. Twenty minutes?’

‘Twenty minutes, partner. At the OK … LMNOP McD Corral.’ He whinnies like a horse on steroids and disconnects.

Show-down time. 

I reach the entrance to the McDonald’s in central Newtown first. Carl loves the place — the sheer American-ness of it — and I’ve seen him gorge his way through three Big Mac combos in one go. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that most of us would rather die than be seen here; he’s never really worried about things like wrecking the environment, globalisation or rates of pay. He even thought that guy who nearly killed himself by eating only super-sized McDonald’s was just too much of a pussy-boy to hack the pace.

Inside, it’s swamped with young mothers who look on, bored, while their kids run riot through the place like Viking hordes. I buy myself a coffee and huddle in a corner by the window while I wait for Carl. He isn’t long. I spot him coming from a mile off, doing some kind of weird tap-dance along the footpath and singing something stupid at full volume to the passers-by. The whites of his eyes are pink, and the allergy rings that always darken underneath his eyes have gone an awful splotchy red. It’s obvious he’s high on something more than just his usual body chemistry.

He crashes up against the doors, pushing instead of pulling, and swears like a trooper as he finally gets it figured and bursts inside. He doesn’t even look around for me, just bowls up to the counter and demands a
feed, slapping several vouchers down onto the counter, triumphant when he finds one still valid. ‘
You can’t have your Kate and Edith too
,’ he sings to the poor Iraqi girl behind the counter, leaning over as she hands him the tray and trying to plant a kiss onto her cheek. She pulls back, horrified. The duty manager (a pimply guy about my age) starts puffing up and making like he’s going to intervene, but Carl backs off, spinning around and scouring the place until he spots me here. ‘
Pardon me
,’ he sings to the whole restaurant, cowboy-style,
‘I’ve got a little guy to kill
.’