Solo (11 page)
At Katie’s house there was a window from the floor to the ceiling in the lounge room and you could see the glowing houses below, and the moving red lights of the cars winding through the streets. The glass had no smudges on it, even on the outside, and when you stood near the edge you thought you might fall through it.
We played in Katie’s room. She had twin beds in gloss white with pale green bedspreads, even though she didn’t share with anyone. There was a matching white bookcase and a wardrobe with louvre doors, but no dust on them. Neither of my bedrooms looked like that.
Katie played Oasis – ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’ on a portable CD player. I had a CD player too, but I only ever played music from my parents’ CD collection – old-fashioned music.
Katie let me hold her Tickle Me Elmo. It smelled toyshop-new, even though she’d had it since Christmas. The pictures in her room were matching and framed, and I bet she wasn’t allowed to stick up any posters with Blu Tack.
I decided that having old money meant that you had to keep your house looking as though nobody actually lived there.
Mrs Winter made coleslaw from scratch and potato bake with bubbling cheese on top. Mr Winter cooked steak on a barbecue with a lid and all sorts of knobs, levers and cables, like a spaceship. Katie showed me how to place my serviette across my lap instead of tucking it into my collar.
During the meal Mrs Winter asked what my father did. I was about to tell them that he had an earthmoving business – my parents had been very clear about me telling lies – but I thought a chemist sounded much better; less nouveau riche.
I wanted them to like me, so when Mr Winter asked for details I pictured the chemist’s shop in my mind and I told him everything I could remember. I told him about the runner and the customers on their plastic chairs and how I played imaginary hopscotch down the middle of the shop while I waited for my dad. I even gave him the address.
The waves are crashing over me again and I’m drowning. There are tears rolling down my cheeks. I’m so tired. I can’t keep my head up, or my eyes open.
The Red Man has me by the shoulders and he’s shaking me.
About two weeks after the runner boy ate all the pills in the chemist’s shop, Paul Hiller pushed in front of me in the canteen line. I punched him in the back of the head, and then when he turned around I punched him in the neck. Then all the kids formed a circle around us and chanted, ‘Fight, fight, fight’.
Paul Hiller’s eyes were wide and his face went white. He looked angry, but mostly he looked surprised. My face was probably the same. We fought because we’d started, and we were full of adrenaline, so we had to keep going. He kicked me in the shins, I pulled his hair and bit his arm.
Everything was static and fuzz except for the grunts I was making and the slapping sounds our limbs made when we hit each other.
When I think about it, it was kind of like sex. I suddenly found myself halfway through and I couldn’t quite remember how it started except that I possibly overreacted to something he did, and those small, mean, ancient circuits in my brain that run reactions and appendages just the same in dogs, bees and crocodiles kicked in, and even as that realisation blossomed in my mind, it was too late to stop.
Mrs Wong broke us up.
That fight with Paul Hiller was the beginning of my parental-separation, trauma-reactive behavioural problems. I was in Year 3.
I went to visit my dad that weekend. He was already thinner. Dad and I shared an egg-and-lettuce sandwich. He said he had taken up yoga and was planning to start a course in wine-making.
He asked me about school and I told him it was good. I didn’t tell him about hitting Paul Hiller, or about the counselling, or about the foster-home. I wanted him to ask me. I wanted him to perceive it the way he’d always known when I needed to go to the toilet or when I hadn’t brushed my teeth before bed. He didn’t see it, though. He was too busy thinking about himself.
When you don’t see me, I feel angry and frightened.
At the same time I was relieved, because if he didn’t know about those things, which were out in the open, he didn’t know about what I’d told the Winters at dinner. Or maybe he did know and it hurt him so much that he couldn’t take in any more information that had anything to do with me.
I asked him if we could go home now. Then he cried and said he wished he could hold me. It was weird. I hadn’t seen him cry before. His face kept crumpling and twisting. He would take in big breaths and hold them, and let them go in a whoosh, as though he was practising for underwater swimming.
I swung my feet under the chair and looked around the room while I waited for him to finish. All the time a thought was running through my head, blinking like one of those mobile street signs.
I broke him. I broke him.
One of the other men was crying too. They all looked ill under the fluorescent lights.
That night I had bad dreams so I never went back. When Itsy went I told her I’d wait for him to come home but he never did.
Our family wasn’t religious, so I didn’t really know how to do it, but I tried praying. I shut my eyes tight and I pressed my hands together, the way kids did on television and asked God to fix it. I’ve never understood about God. At the Catholic school I went to later we prayed every day in Religious Studies. The Brothers and Sisters were so convinced it would work. It’s still mysterious and vague to me, like electricity, or car engines – even when someone explains how it works, it’s still incomprehensible and magic.
I’m doing it now.
The anxiety is crashing over me in waves so powerful that it pins me down and makes my body twitch. I’m doing the breathing. I’m wishing that my father would come and rescue me. He never will. He can’t because he’s broken.
I don’t know how long the Red Man has been shaking me. It feels like hours. My body aches inside and out. My head fuzzes and throbs like a radio out of tune.
I’m Gretel. I’m Briar Rose and Little Red Cap. Why is it always the girls who suffer in those fairy tales? The boys find tricky ways out. The boys come home with a fortune in gold.
‘I’m not going to talk about Dad. I’m not doing this, any of this any more. I don’t have to.’
He puts his hands on the sides of my face and squeezes, mashing my cheeks into my teeth. His chest is heaving ‘It’s
His
turn to say sorry to me! Yes, he will! And
you
will too.’
He lets go. He scrambles out of the tent and I can hear him muttering and the sound of his feet scuffing through the grass as he walks away.
He could leave me here. I could be rid of him altogether. For ever. It’s too easy.
That was all I had to do. I should have done it years ago.
I start to laugh, and then there it is, the un-electrified half of my cage. I can see it, but I don’t move. It’s a portcullis opening up in my mind. It’s a yawning guillotine and I know that what is worse than being with the Red Man is being without him.
Sinner, there is no such thing
Beginner, I have learned to sing
Forever I must walk this earth
Like some forgotten soldier.
‘
S
INNER’
N
EIL
F
INN
Scott winks at me and for once he’s not just the runner at the chemist’s shop who shares the same dad as me. He’s Scott who is family. Then there are sirens, but not for long, and the woman with the baby starts screaming.
There are policemen outside. Nobody has said anything, but I know. There’s a dread deep in my belly.
Scott isn’t joking any more. He steps forward and he opens the ziplock bags. He tips the pills into his mouth. He’s chewing them. He opens bags and vials and he’s throwing them back. I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he tries to swallow.
I think maybe they’re lollies after all.
There’s foam coming out of Scott’s mouth now. Dad is staring at him. His lips are turned down, but he doesn’t try to stop it. Dad should be trying to stop him. Nobody is saying anything. The only noise is the woman and the baby both screaming. It’s so high it goes right inside your head.
The door opens and the policemen are right there. The old man starts out of his chair and stumbles two steps and then sprawls on the floor.
One of the officers takes the baby out of the woman’s arms. She doesn’t resist. Her mouth is open wide so I can see her fillings. The snot gathers on her top lip and the tears slide down her throat and soak into her shirt.
Scott’s choking. He’s retching and retching, his chest heaves and his back arches. The foam is running over his chin and it hits the ground in little splatters. His face is going red. It’s so red it’s purple.
It’s all happening quickly, but none of the police officers is running. One of them kicks the back of Scott’s knees and he crumples to the ground. They turn him on his side. The policeman has Scott’s mouth open. He’s holding his tongue down with his fingers.
Scott’s staring at me. His eyes are so wide they look as though they’re going to pop out. He coughs again, a really big one, and suddenly the whites of his eyes go red, filled with blood. I scream and draw my knees up to my chest. He’s still staring at me, his face is red – all red, even his eyeballs – and purple and swollen.
Someone lifts me up by my underarms and carries me out of the room. The police officer carries me out into the street and it’s daylight. It’s an afternoon and the sun shines through the leaves, making dapples on the footpath. A pair of Indian myna birds squabble on a low branch.
An old lady down the road is wheeling out her rubbish bin. A car goes past and slows down. The driver is rubbernecking. Inside one of the police cars parked on the kerb I see an officer with the baby on his lap. The baby’s face is scrunched as it screams. Its little hands are waving and trembling with the strain of it.
A van turns into the laneway. It’s an ambulance. There are no lights and sirens. It’s come to take Scott away. Scott’s choked. He’s choked to death on Dad’s drugs.
Itsy made me go to the court on the day my dad was going to be called to the stand. She dressed me in pink flounces and ribbons, as if I was a little kid. She was still tugging the tag off the skirt in the cab on the way there.
Itsy wore a black suit and not very much make-up. Her hair was neat and she looked competent and beautiful. After she’d paid for the taxi she walked quickly, as if she was going to a meeting and I was her heavy briefcase.
On the front steps of the courthouse there were reporters and a few television cameras. Some of the photographers took photos of us, but mostly they ignored us so I guessed they must have been waiting for someone else to arrive.
The courtroom was all wood. I remember that it smelled like a wet woolly jumper, but maybe I imagined that smell because of the wigs.
It was boring and mostly the people in the black capes spoke in slow, monotonous voices using words or combinations of words that I didn’t understand. I swung my feet under the chair, rolled my hair around my finger and wished that I’d brought a Big W catalogue so that I could daydream about all the toys I wanted.
After a while a witness was called. He swore his name was Inspector Michael Craig Winter. He sat down. He was wearing a suit and a serious face. I tugged on Mummy’s arm ready to tell her that I knew that man, but then they started the questions and everyone was so quiet and serious that I was too scared to talk. I twisted the hem of my skirt in my fingers and decided to tell her later.
Katie’s dad talked about the ‘incident on Farley Road’. He said he’d received a tip-off and his glance flickered around the courtroom, landed on my face, cold and flat, like a slap, and then continued on towards the jury.
I felt hot and itchy all of a sudden, and when I looked down I realised that I’d wet myself. I started to cry, as softly as could because I was embarrassed. Itsy carried me out of the courtroom, and I cried louder because I knew that everyone could see what I’d done.
The first thing that hits me is the air, so fresh, moist and earthy it feels like mineral water for my lungs.
The darkness has sucked the colour away and everything is shades of grey. I squint into the gloom and strain to make the shapes into forms that I recognise. After a dozen paces my eyes adjust and I can make out branches and shrubs around me. The sky is lighter on the horizon. Dawn.
The ground is spongy and damp. As I sink into it I can feel the mud sticking to the soles of my feet and squishing between my toes. Along the way I find a rusty star picket leaning against a tree. I pull it out of the ground and use it as a walking stick.
I’m not following a path, but every now and then I find an animal track and follow that until the thick scrub becomes impenetrable. I don’t understand why they just stop. Sometimes I stand still, listening, watching for some clue as to why this part of the bush is a destination for some animal.
As the morning warms and there is no sign of humans I’m getting the panicky fluttering feeling. I’m finding it hard to swallow.
Then there’s a road.
As soon as I step out from the trees, the sun sears my skin. I abandon my star picket, cross the gravel and stand in the middle of the black tar. It’s gummy with heat. My skin feels steeped in sunlight. Even my hair is hot.
I don’t know which way to go. One way leads further into the mountains and the other to civilisation, but I don’t know which is which. There is a gentle slope up a hill.
I’ve got a Paul Simon song running through my head and I murmur along.
I can’t run, but I can walk much faster than this.
It sounds hopeful and I start to smile. I don’t know which way to go, because freedom isn’t a place. I head up the hill, because it looks like the wrong way, and it’s harder, and life is like that.
