Yellow (15 page)

Mum's bedroom door is still closed when I head to school the next day. I know she's alive, because she told me to bugger off when I tentatively knocked on it before I left. It's the last day of school before the first-term holidays – a whole two weeks stuck with Mum.

Super.

I know that something's wrong as soon as I step through the school gates. Kids are shooting me sidelong glances and the air is thick with whispers and that sharp hyena laughter. It doesn't take too long to figure out why – the local paper had taken my photograph while I was performing my speech, and now they've gone and stuck it on the front page.

My heart drops.

My soul slinks out from under my feet and scampers off to hide in some small, shadowed corner.

Everything turns the colour of shame.

Photocopies of the paper are plastered all over the school, except whoever did the photocopying has drawn all over my face, adding glasses, blacked-out teeth and alien antennas, and there's a speech bubble coming out of my mouth saying E.T. phone home. Another one has me with whiskers and cat-ears, a collar around my neck, and a sketch of Mrs Thomas leading me by a chain. The caption there reads Kirra Barley – the teacher's pet. The drawings were done by Tara, I can tell. She's always been a bit of an artist.

I hate Mrs Thomas for making me do the speech.

I will hate her for as long as I live.

The tears pooling in my eyes make everything blurry and warped, like the world is one of those mirrors you see at the fairground. I race around the school, tearing all the posters down from the walls, and by the time I'm done there's a pile in my arms that reaches up to my chin. I shout and stomp at an ibis to chase it away, and stick them all in a bin near the drama hall, ripping each of them to pieces before chucking them. Some slouchy, skater kid laughs and quotes the poster as he passes me. I turn around to confront him.

‘You want to start something?' I shout and I know my eyes are blazing like wildfire. The kid stops snickering.

‘Oi, settle down . . .' he shoots back, arms raised and fingers splayed, in that gesture that says ‘keep away from me, crazy girl'.

I'm the crazy girl.

I'm the crazy girl and I don't give a shit.

First period is history, and the teacher hasn't arrived yet. Early mornings have never really been his thing. I slam my bag down at a free desk up the front and I brace myself for the barrage. I don't have to wait long, teenagers and restraint don't really go hand in hand. Willow shoots me an unimpressed look as she's walking to her desk.

‘Extracurricular activity, hey?' she mutters. I want to say sorry, but sorry is one of those words that you really have to mean if you're going to say it. It's only two syllables, some air, and teeth, and tongue, but it's the meaning behind the word that gives it power. Otherwise it's just teeth, and tongue, and air, and sound. I'm not actually sorry, not really. I mean, I'm sorry that I didn't tell her the whole truth about the speech, but she's mostly mad at me because I didn't trust her. The thing is, even if I did tell her, she wouldn't believe me anyway, and then she'd still be mad at me because she'd think I was a liar. I can't tell her I'm sorry, so I don't say anything at all, and she looks disappointed in me as she stalks over to a desk at the other side of the room.

Cassie, Lou, Sasha and Tara are falling over themselves laughing up the back. Sasha misquotes from the paper, mimicking me in a whiny voice, ‘All I've ever known in my fourteen years is spit balls!' as Lou flicks a spit ball at me. I ignore it, and focus on the blackboard, my eyes blazing.

‘Nerd alert,' laughs Tara. My knuckles are white, gripping the edge of my desk.

And then Cassie. ‘Will your mum still gatecrash like a pathetic drunk when you're living that glamorous life in the city?'

With her words, it's like the wiring inside me has been tripped, something snaps, the husk which holds everything in cracks apart, setting everything free, and rage tears me open. I see red, the world is pulsing with red, and the words that have laid dormant all my life come to me. They've been triggered, and they're screaming inside of me, the ones that Boogie told me to use, the ones that draw blood.

I want to taste that blood.

I slam my desk back and face Cassie, my eyes wide and fierce and flaming.

‘Come up with some new material, Cassie, you've done that one to death. Oh wait, you can't, because you're so stupid that your parents had to take you to hearing and sight specialists when we were in year five. Remember that? They figured you had to have some sort of impairment to account for your bad grades but it turns out there was nothing wrong, you were just actually that dumb.'

Cassie's mouth swings open in shock. I've never talked back before, and I wasn't supposed to know this, I'd overheard her parents speaking about it at a sleepover once, when she and Lou had locked me out of her bedroom. The class is cracking up now, and the words hang in the room, as real and solid as if I'd painted them on the walls in thick red paint.

‘I dare you to come closer and say that, you freak,' she hisses.

Drunk on the words, I swagger up to where she's standing. She's half a head taller than me, and she looks down at me, her lips curled in disgust in a way that almost makes her ugly. More words are itching inside my mouth. In a steady, sharp voice I speak up.

‘I didn't want to come too close, in case you wet yourself, you know, like how you wet the bed until year seven.'

The class starts howling in laughter, hooting, the walls are echoing with it. Cassie's face cracks, like a dam has broken, and shame spreads through her capillaries and stains her face red. The next thing I know, her perfectly manicured hand swings around and slaps me in the face. It doesn't even hurt.

It feels like before all of this, I was born inside out, my nerve endings worn on the outside of my skin, so that even the slightest thing wounded me. Now, I feel like I've been turned back the right way again, and my skin has grown over and become tougher, like the skin on Lark's fingertips, how they've become stiff and calloused from playing the guitar. It feels like nothing can penetrate it. It feels like I have scales and claws.

I smile at Cassie.

I smile at her, and I remember what Boogie taught me, and I punch.

Shoulders back, knuckles tilted, strong.

This punch draws blood.

Cassie's crying, holding her nose, which is gushing blood all over her pretty face and down onto her school shirt. Willow raises a disbelieving eyebrow at me. Noah is staring incredulously. The rest of the class is gape mouthed and silent.

The history teacher walks in, five minutes late and all befuddled. He's surprised to see the class so quiet, and it takes him a moment to clock us. By then it's too late. I've grabbed my bag and I push past him and out of the classroom.

I run.

My feet are pounding down the street, matching the swollen pumping of my heart, and a sentence repeats itself in my head. Boogie's words, when I was asking about Mum. ‘Drag her to get help. Chain her up. Scream at her.' I pass the puckered, slouching houses down the bad end of town.

My end of town.

My legs burn as I run up the hill to where the houses start to shine from fresh licks of paint, and I stand wheezing for a moment when I reach the top. If I looked behind me I could see the strip of bush down far below, where Boogie and the phone box are. I don't look. I run down the hill now, to where the houses stand tall and proud and solid and new. I don't stop until I'm at the main street of town, and I double over, hands on knees, trying to catch snatches of breaths where I can find them. After my breathing has returned to normal, I walk into the hardware store, and I take the fifty dollars Lark gave me out of my wallet. I take that fifty dollars and I buy chains and padlocks. The tattooed, mop-headed owner of the store gives me a quizzical look. I return his stare.

‘We have dogs.'

He shrugs and takes my money. I still have twenty dollars left, so I go next door to the grocery store and stock up on Gatorade and vitamins.

‘You doing lots of sports, honey?' the lady at the counter asks me.

I plaster on a smile. ‘Training for the Olympics.'

Her gaze sweeps my skinny, completely muscle-free frame.

‘Sure you are, honey.'

Once outside I take a breath. This is it.

I test Mum's bedroom door and it's not locked anymore. She's lying on her bed, asleep, still wearing the clothes she had on yesterday. I stand there for a moment. Fingers of light push through the small gaps between blinds, and pierce the space like prison bars. I'm distracted by the dust motes that are dancing around in the light. They're beautiful, dancing there in the light, and I wonder how many little scraps of beauty we miss because we're too busy walking around in the dark. I tiptoe over to the window and trail my fingers through the beams of light, the air around my fingers swirling the dust around in little eddies. I'm not sure how long I stand there for, but I'm jolted out of myself by Mum. She coughs, a hacking kind of cough, and I stiffen, but she just turns over and settles back into her dreamless sleep. This is it, I think. And Boogie's words replay themselves over and over again in my brain. ‘Drag her to get help. Chain her up. Scream at her.'

I take the chain and padlocks from my shopping bag, and carefully, as to not wake her, I loop one end around Mum's ankle. It almost looks like jewellery. I make sure it's tight enough that she can't slip it off, but not too tight that it cuts off circulation, then I take a padlock and hold the links in place. I take the other end of the chain and loop it around the metal frame at the foot of her bed. With the second padlock I secure it in place. The chain is only long enough for her to walk a little bit around her bedroom, so I scrounge around the house for two buckets and place them next to her bed. That'll have to do for a bathroom, for now. The thought of it turns my stomach. Thankfully she's been shopping, and that means she's stocked up on two new cartons of beer, as well as filling the liquor cabinet. That's good. I'll need it. I remove all the beers from the cartons, and I fold the cardboard cartons flat, using gaffer tape to stick them against the window for sound insulation. The tendrils of light all disappear, but I still think of the dust motes dancing invisibly around me. Mum's bedroom window backs onto the backyard, so it's unlikely that anyone will hear her, and the chain isn't long enough for her to reach the window to pull the cardboard off. It's all done now, all there's left to do is wait for her to wake up.

So I wait, my veins filled with numbness.

She wakes up at about 11 a.m. I've dragged the television into her room and I'm watching a cooking show, hosted by some unnaturally smiley presenter. I wonder how smiley he'd be if he had to walk around in my skin.

‘I've made you Vegemite on toast, and there's water, vitamins and Gatorade next to your bed,' I tell her, without taking my eyes off the television. She goes to drag herself off the bed when she registers the chain around the ankle.

‘What the hell, Kirra?'

I chew on my lip.

‘How many times have I asked you to stop drinking, Mum?'

She pulls on her chain. It doesn't budge. ‘Kirra, unchain me right now. This is ridiculous.'

I turn to her, my face hard. ‘No, Mum. What's ridiculous is having my mother die before I turn eighteen because she won't stop drinking.'

I'm shaking now, and so is she. Her voice is edged in hysteria, the kind of voice that you'd hear coming from a fifth-storey window ledge. ‘Unchain me now, Kirra!'

‘No!'

‘Unchain me or I'll scream!'

‘Scream then!'

Mum starts screaming, and I blast the radio next to me – hits of the 70s and 80s. Mum's cranked that station so loud almost every day now that none of the neighbours would think it was strange. After a good five minutes of hysterical yelling, Mum settles down. She's shaking badly now.

‘Kirra, I need a drink.'

I crouch down next to the bed. ‘I know you do, Mum, so I'm going to get you a beer, okay? But you don't get another one until midday. You got that?'

I walk out of the room and read the label on the can of beer. It's one point four standard drinks. She can only have one standard drink, so I take a glass and fill it with two thirds of a can. Mum looks at me as I hand it over to her. ‘What did I do to get you for a daughter?' she mutters.

‘I've often thought the same thing myself.'

We stare each other down. Mum downs her drink in one straight gulp, then continues to glare at me.

‘I hate you,' she tells me.

‘I know.'

Then I pass her the TV remote control, and we wait.

The overhead fan slices the day into heavy, bite-sized chunks. Mum is all anxious and sweaty, she wriggles around in bed so much that her legs remind me of those skink tails that wriggle about independently, even after they've fallen off from the lizard. Her eyes are wide, and the pale blue of them makes them look like fish eyes. All I can do is feed her Gatorade, and a cup of beer every hour. At one o'clock she swipes the cup out of my hand, then yelps and crawls down to try to suck it up from the carpet. I get her another glass. She's not in a great way, and no television station can hold her attention. I take her wrist in my hand and measure her heart rate against the clock. It's 90 beats per minute. Mine is 75. I know from physical education classes that if it gets over a hundred then I'll have to call the hospital. I pray I won't have to do that. What can I say when the ambulance comes to get her? That I've chained my mother up because a ghost told me to do it? The worst thing is when she has to go to the toilet.

‘There's a bucket there, and some toilet paper.'

She eyes me incredulously.

‘I could have gone to university if it wasn't for you. I might have been someone. And then twenty-two hours in labour, Kirra. Twenty-two bloody hours, and this is how you repay me?' she hisses at me, as her hands tremor some more. I roll my eyes at her.

‘I never asked to be born. If you'd used protection you'd have done me a favour, to be honest.'

I look away as she squats over the bucket. I carry the bucket to the toilet and pour the sloppy diarrhoea into the bowl and flush. I start to dry-retch, and squat down in the bathroom, trying to steady my breathing. I take the bucket outside to the overgrown backyard, avoiding the spider webs and hopping up and down to pluck a bindii from my foot. As I spray the bucket with the hose the violence of the water pushes the bucket over.

And this is what it is to be fourteen.

The night time's the worst. It hangs so heavy, it's like the sky's fallen down on us in great big slabs. Mum has nightmares. I've dragged my sheet and pillows into her room, and I try to fall asleep on her floor, but she keeps repeating the same thing in her sleep, over and over again – ‘I never meant to hurt you, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to, I didn't.'

I wonder if she's talking about me or Lark. It doesn't seem likely. No matter what she's done, no matter how embarrassing she's been, the only person she's ever felt sorry for is herself.

The next day Mum only gets a drink every hour and a half, and she watches the clock with all the intensity of a person on death row. The bruises from where she's thrown herself down the stairs have bloomed, and it looks like someone's wiped their dirty hands all over her skin. She paces the room as far as the chain will allow and she hurls abuse at me, so sharp it feels like the words have thorns that could stick into my skin. Luckily I've grown my armour. I think of how maybe all the cutting words over the past few weeks have caused scar tissue to grow back where the words sliced me up, so that my skin's all puckered and thicker than it used to be. When I make her an omelette she throws it back at me, and for the rest of the day I'm picking egg out of my hair. I pass her clean clothes and a bucket of water, soap and a sponge, and when she throws this back at me I've learnt how to duck. The hallway gets a soaking. By the late afternoon I've had a gutful.

Mum's sitting on the floor with her bird legs folded up to her throat, and her head resting on her knees, so that all I can see is hair, so soft and yellow like a baby chicken's.

‘You've made your point. Now let me go now,' she sobs from beneath her hair. My heart is hard, like it's been calcified. I can barely believe it's still soft enough to beat.

‘Not until you're sober.'

She raises her head, her eyes full of hatred from behind those creases that other people call laugh lines. Not on her, though; she hasn't laughed enough to grow them.

‘I'm bloody old enough to do what I want. You're being a brat. You just want attention. You're a little attention suck, aren't you?' she spits, her hands trembling.

The world starts to pulse red again, and that wiring trips again, the one that releases the rage that tears me open.

‘Sure, I'm doing this for attention. And now that I have your attention, do you want to see what it's like to have the person you love most in the world drink themselves into a stupor? Do you? Do you?' I scream at her. Then I get up and stomp to the liquor cabinet and take a bottle of gin. I carry it back to her bedroom, and I sit just far enough back so that she can't reach me. Her eyes are fixed on the bottle.

‘This is what it's like, Mum.' I take a breath and swig from the bottle. It burns, but in a way that's bearable. The first good heat I've felt all summer, I think, as I ignore the wretched taste and focus on the numbing sensation that courses through my body.

‘Stop it, Kirra, you've made your point.'

‘Oh, I haven't even
begun
to make my point,' I snarl back as I take another swig. My whole body wants to gag it back up again, but I force it down. The overhead fan keeps chopping the day into pieces as I take swig after swig, and I feel the gin burning like an awful fire in my belly.