Alyssa Brugman has worked in public relations but now writes full-time. Her earlier books, Finding Grace, Walking Naked and Being Bindy, are very popular with readers and critics. Solo is her eighth novel. Alyssa lives in rural New South Wales. The author would like to thank the following for permission to use lyrics or quotations in the text: Bradley Dowden for an extract from ‘The Liar Paradox’, the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy; Mushroom Music Publishing for lines from ‘Sinner’ by Neil Finn. Every reasonable attempt was made to contact copyright holders for other lyrics, and the author and publisher invite those who have not replied, or who were not successfully traced, to contact us to offer permission and request a reasonable sum for use of this material. Sources are given alongside the lyrics. First published in 2007 Copyright © Alyssa Brugman 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Brugman, Alyssa, 1974– .
Solo. For secondary school students. ISBN 978 174114 742 1. 1. Teenage girls – Juvenile fiction. 2. Emotional problems in teenagers – Fiction. 3. Camps – Juvenile fiction. 4. Solitude – Juvenile fiction. 5. Life change events – Juvenile fiction. I. Title. A823.4 Cover and text designed by Ruth Grüner Cover photograph: Kevin Russ/istockphoto.com Set in 11.8pt Adobe Garamond by Ruth Grüner Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com
PartOne Camp
I gotta right to sing the blues I gotta right to moan inside I gotta right to sit and cry Down around the river. A certain man in this little town Keeps draggin’ my poor heart around
All I see for me is misery. ‘I got a right to sing the blues’ Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler Vocals: Billie Holiday
Chapter 1 Asterisks My counsellor gave me the pamphlet for this camp, but I didn’t read it because I knew it would say, ‘Fun, fun, fun! Make new friends. Sing “Kumbaya”, and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in rounds. Do archery, rock-climbing and canoeing. Do African drumming and papier-mâché to stimulate your creative side!’ That’s what all the brochures say, but it’s never how the camps turn out. There’s no way they’re going to give me
a bow and arrow.
Not after the bakery incident. Everything is hype. All the ads on TV tell you your life will be better if you get a new corrugated-iron roof or granite kitchen bench. Your family will be closer and more loving if you eat fried chicken or tomato-based simmer sauces. You’ll be tougher and stronger if you drink lemon-flavoured soft drink or eat a fibrous breakfast cereal. Asterisk conditions apply. There’s always a catch. When I say, ‘There’s always a catch,’ my counsellor wonders aloud whether my ability to create and sustain healthy relationships is hampered by my negative attitude. When you say I’m negative, I feel like punching somebody. Maybe you. She’s wrong. What I lack is the motivation
to ‘create and sustain healthy relationships’.
It’s all crap because no product is going to make you stronger, sweeter, more attractive, or happier. You have to do it from the inside – and you’re not going to find a more positive attitude than that. Asterisk. Except chocolate. Chocolate makes you happier. Everyone else has read the brochure. I don’t know what I’m doing here, why I have been chosen. The camp counsellors call us ‘Youths with Potential’. At first I thought they meant potential prisoners, but some of the others are softer than me. Broken.
I do know we were all given the chance to do the Solo – twenty-four hours in the bush by ourselves – but not everyone took it. In fact, of the twenty-five of us here, only five picked it. There was some fine print. There was an asterisk and I missed it.
Chapter 2 Callum’s Belly Sometimes you look at someone for the first time and you think straightaway that they’re gorgeous. Other times you see just an ordinary person, and then a while later, after you see how they carry themselves and you watch their personality shimmer through their features, you suddenly realise that they are the kind of beautiful that you can’t look away from, and you wonder why you didn’t see it the first time. I was at the kerb when Callum arrived at the camp. There was a woman in the car with him. It could have been his mother, or maybe his social worker dropped him off the way mine did. The woman spoke to him for a moment, putting her hand on his shoulder, and he nodded. As he climbed out, he swung his bag over his shoulder. I twitched my mouth in a brief smile, but his eyes glided over me as though I was just another tree or signpost, his expression as inscrutable as a cat’s, and then he slouched down the path towards the buildings. His face was shiny and his hair was damp at the hairline, as though he’d been in the pool, or just finished playing 6 sport. Callum looked like he’d had a really expensive haircut about six months ago, but now it stuck out everywhere. He wore a houndstooth vest that might have been stolen from an ancient golfer, skater boots and two leather wristbands, then some really sensible dress shorts like the ones my geography teacher wears with his socks pulled up. He had criss-cross scars on his forearms. They looked designed, ritualistic and deliberate. It wasn’t a pattern exactly – maybe some ancient, lined script, Inca or Mayan. He looked like an unwashed musician – one of The Strokes. My first thought was that he was cute but not special.
The outfit was borderline. Usually people who make a statement with their clothes don’t have much else to say. I also decided to ignore him next time I saw him because he made me embarrassed about the twitch-smile when I was already nervous. Which was why I was standing on the kerb practising my breathing when the others were already gathered in the courtyard between the mess hall and the cabins, swapping names and the kind of jokes that would become had-to-be-there recurring jokes over the next few weeks. I was trying to breathe, while inside I was imagining what would happen when I finally went down the path to join them. The group is conversing and I stand at the edge listening. I laugh when they laugh, and then I start thinking of something to say, because you’re not officially part of the conversation until you’ve added something and somebody has acknowledged it with a reply. I’m concentrating on what I’ve planned to say – I’m examining it for yuk-yuk value, cleverness, or sarcasm. Does it sound big-headed? Does it sound ignorant? Do I really know what I’m talking about? I open my mouth and my heart beats faster because even if it is fun and clever they may not acknowledge me. They could skip past the comment as though it never happened, leaving me space to slink away, knowing my place. Let even one of them try to talk to me after that! For the whole rest of camp I will wear my earphones and stick my face in a book, pretending I’m antisocial by choice. I’ll yawn in their face, or burn them with an acid smile. Worse, there might be that long pause where they exchange glances. They could all shuffle away and form a tighter circle, leaving me on the outside. Worse still, one of them could acknowledge my comment by giving me a gentle explanation of all the ways in which I am wrong, ignorant and not funny. Worst of all – someone could cut me down with a quip, leaving me exposed and desperate like a tourist stranded on a coral reef. Maybe they just won’t like me? As long as I splash around the shore of the conversation, never dipping in, I won’t have to know either way. Another car pulled up on the other side of the street. There was a girl inside. I shook my hands and plucked at my clothing. I closed my eyes and tried to do positive scenario projection, but I couldn’t. When I opened my eyes again, the girl was standing in front of me. Her face was white and when she spoke 8
she let out a big whoosh of air as if she had been holding her breath too. ‘I’m so glad I don’t have to go in by myself !’ She said her name was Bethany. I thought she was nervous, but later I realised she was always like that. Even when she smiled she was pinched and breathless, as though she had just received sad news and was waiting for things to get worse. We walked down the path together. The group stood silent in a loose cluster, hands in pockets, with their bags between their feet like penguins with eggs. Callum yawned, stretching out his arms, and his vest rode up above the hem of his pants. I could see the little line of hair below his navel disappearing into the elastic band of his underpants. I thought I was looking discreetly, but Bethany raised an eyebrow at me and we both giggled. Our bonding moment. The next morning at breakfast I watched Callum talking with the other boys. He was fidgety. He had his forearm on a chair next to his, rocking it back and forth, jiggling his knee, rolling his shoulders. He was wearing a blue checked cowboy shirt with the sleeves ripped off. When he scratched the back of his neck I could see the pale skin of his side, just below his underarm. There was the beginning of a wide scar, white and raised with stitch marks like a fishbone. It made me wonder if he’d taken the scarification thing too far, or if he’d been in a really bad car accident. It was a puzzle and I worried at it like a loose tooth. I think about Callum. When I am having lustful thoughts about him, that’s what I imagine – I see those parts of him that are not private, but secret anyway.
Chapter 3 Opening Line Your opening line tells people what you care about and what sort of attitude you have. It makes a picture in the other person’s mind and it doesn’t really matter what else you say after that. They already have an image of you in their head. I usually start with a story about when I lived at Nan and Pop’s place. They had a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Macquarie. The house was perched on the edge of the lake and had views to the south. People stayed there just for the night or maybe for months at a time. Nan made meals for them while Pop fished and took care of the garden. He taught me the names of all the trees and shrubs. The house was old and creaky and had a timber verandah running all the way around the outside. There were pots of geraniums in the corners and a swinging chair with a vinyl covering that fluttered and slapped in the wind. All the doors to the bedrooms were on the outside, leading onto the verandah. The only internal doors went from the kitchen to the dining room and then into the sitting room where there was an old TV on wooden legs, and a table with what Nan called ‘the tea-and-coffee-making facilities’, which was really just a sugar bowl and some individually wrapped biscuits. I slept in a room on the east side of the house which had three sets of bunk beds all covered in fuchsia-coloured chenille bedspreads with a fringe around the hem. Nan said it was retro. She told me they were coming back in – she’d seen them at Spotlight. Pop said they were antique. At the bottom of the garden, at the water’s edge, was an old timber boatshed. Inside there was a rowboat tied to a winch. You turned a lever and the boat would travel down the rail and into the water. Pop and I used to drop crab pots into the bay in the afternoon and collect them the next morning. The crabs inside snapped their claws. I’d squeal and laugh. Pop said that sound carried over water because there was nothing to stop it. He said people would hear my shrieks in New Zealand. While Pop worked in the garden, Nan and I made cupcakes from a packet. We ate them straight out of the baking tin before they even cooled. I liked that picture. I hoped the people I told could smell the baking and the salt spray, and hear the lap of the water over the crushed shells and coarse dark sand that was the shore. I wished they would see my grey-haired guardians as playful and sincere – active and at the same time still and
constant. I wanted them to imagine me as a lanky tomboy with a ragged fringe that I cut myself, and grazes on my knees from climbing trees. On that first night at camp, Bethany had the bunk above mine. She told me that for her seventh birthday her parents had given her a puppy, a book on how to raise a puppy, and a bowl, collar and lead all in the same shade of lilac, which had been her favourite colour at the time. She had called her puppy Minty, but he was very energetic and after a few weeks her parents decided that their family wasn’t ready for a dog so they gave Minty away. They also gave away her book on how to raise a puppy and the matching bowl, collar and lead. Callum’s first story was about how one day he had been body-surfing with his dad and they swam way out to the breakers off a sandbar. After a while Callum noticed that his father wasn’t there any more. He looked back at the beach and his dad was sitting on the shore, arms wrapped around his knees, watching. When he saw Callum was looking, he held his hands over his head, palms together – a shark fin. ‘He saw a shark and he swam all the way in. Fair dink. Didn’t bother to call out to me or anything!’ Callum grinned and shook his head. ‘Silly old bastard. Could have at least got them to turn on the siren or something.’ When I heard Bethany’s and Callum’s opening lines I wondered how they had been chosen to come on this camp. I wondered what sort of potential they had that I had too. I wondered if my opening line was as see-through as theirs.
Chapter 4 Exercises Wendy, one of the counsellors, divided us into two groups. Group A would do the meal preparation and Group B would clean up. She explained slowly, and in a number of different ways, that the groups would be randomly selected at each meal, because they didn’t want to ‘develop an atmosphere of competition and exclusiveness’. Callum is in Group A. Bethany is in Group A. Wendy calls my name and I’m in Group A too. I don’t mind counsellors and schoolteachers. They don’t raise their voices. If they get mad at you they tell you why – usually over and over again. They distinguish between the behaviour and the individual. You can tell they’re exercising their training whenever they open their mouths. When you do X, I feel Y. We were making salad wraps. There would be no meat served at this camp. I shredded lettuce and eyed the others. Callum was at the other end of the bench spreading hummus on the flat bread with a spatula. I tried to think of something to say. With normal kids it’s easier. You can ask where they live, or about their family or school, but here I couldn’t assume that they had a school, family or home. ‘I’m glad, because I’m vegetarian anyway,’ Bethany told me from across the bench. She was on cheese slices. ‘I hate it when people make a big deal about it, as if I’ve got some kind of medical condition.’ ‘Don’t you think it’s weird how stuff that is bad for you is always cheaper than stuff that is good for you?’ I commented. The others listened to us mutely. ‘At most restaurants there’s only one vegetarian option, even though there are more vegetarians all the time,’
Bethany added. I said, ‘It looks like we’re only going to get one option here whether we’re vegetarian or not.’ ‘I don’t know how you could not eat meat. It’s just too yummy,’ one of the girls said, shrugging. Bethany pursed her lips but she didn’t defend herself. We lapsed into silence again. I ate my wrap standing up and then waited in line for a plastic cup of juice. While Group B cleaned up, Wendy handed us on to another counsellor, Stefan, who gave us a creative writing exercise to do. Stefan told us to think about someone who provokes a strong emotional response in us and write a positive statement about that person. We were sitting in a circle outside, under a fig tree. There was a breeze and we could hear birds. It was obviously supposed to be a stress-free, stimulating learning environment. I held my pen above the paper and thought about what I might write. Callum has a cleft in his chin. I’d like to press it with my pinkie finger. My counsellor has a clear voice like a radio announcer on the classical station. Pop’s fingers are wrinkly, bent and swollen like tiny sweet potatoes, but he can thread a hook on a fishing line, patch a crab pot with fancy knots and write love letters to Nan in handwriting that swirls and twists like a tango on the page. I tapped my pen between my teeth. Bethany was scribbling away. I peeked at her paper. My brother has a good imagination. He is also good at team sports, for example, soccer. One time at Easter he stole some of those chocolate eggs with the cream in the middle off the counter at the newsagent (which was bad), but he gave me one (which was nice). Bethany looked over at mine. I grinned at her and wrote, Callum has a nice bum. Bethany smiled and then whispered, ‘It’s supposed to be someone you feel negative about.’ I hadn’t heard that part. ‘Yes,’ interrupted Stefan, ‘think of someone who might have made you feel sad or angry – someone who might have disappointed you in the past.’ As he walked towards where I was sitting I scrunched up the paper so he couldn’t see what I had written.
They might call it creative writing, but it seemed to me much more like the affirmation exercises that my counsellor makes me do. My counsellor (the one who thought wilderness therapy would be just ace) says that you can be angry about something a person has done, but your anger is unlikely to change how that person behaves. She says the only person whose behaviour you can change is your own. I poised my pen over the page again and tried to think of something positive to say about my parents, other than that after I turn sixteen I won’t have to see them any more. Stefan wanted us to share with the rest of the group so I quickly wrote, ‘My mother has very long eyelashes.’ Most of the others had written something about their relatives, except for a boy so fair he was almost albino. He wrote about the staff at the video shop at his local shopping centre. I wondered if he so struggled for something nice to say about his family that he picked someone at random, or whether there really was an incident at the video shop that scarred him. I had an incident at a bakery once. I watched him, wondering if he was a kindred spirit. Callum wrote, ‘My mother is emotionally nomadic,’ which I thought was cheating, because it wasn’t positive, it was negative dressed up as ambivalent. I was disappointed. I wanted him to say something about himself. I wanted a handle that I could use to open the next conversation, so when it came time to say mine aloud I said, ‘My father is customer-focused.’
Chapter 5 Monsters Night-time at the camp wasn’t as loud as I expected. Every now and then I could hear muffled laughter coming from one of the other cabins, or the scuffing feet of a camp counsellor on the beat. I could hear night birds calling, and insects, but traffic only rarely. It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to quiet. Every time Bethany moved, the whole bunk would squeak. ‘Lie still, will you?’ I hissed. ‘I can’t get comfortable! The mattress sags in the middle.’ She wiggled and the bed screeched. ‘Lie on the edge, then.’ ‘What if I fall out?’ ‘You won’t fall. What’s the matter with you, anyway?’ Bethany rolled over and sighed. ‘I’m worried about the Solo. Are you doing one?’ ‘I go out after you come back, I think. Have you changed your mind?’ I could hear her breathing, and the crumpling sound as she moved under the doona. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s all right now. You’re here and I feel like an idiot being scared, but by myself in the dark with all that bush around me, with all that space, and no one else . . . Do you think that’s dumb?’ ‘No, it’s not dumb.’ I had been thinking the same thing. ‘They said there will be patrols checking for the flags,’ I reassured her. ‘But how often? Once an hour? Once a day?’ she asked. ‘And a flag seems a bit kind of, passive, you know? I want something that makes a noise.’
‘An air horn like the ones they have at the football. La cucharacha la cucharacha.
That would draw attention.
Even a whistle. You could wear it around your neck, or tie it to your shirt – a whistle and a light, like they have on lifejackets on aeroplanes.’ We lay in silence for a moment and then Bethany said, ‘I don’t know if a whistle is going to help you much if nobody has noticed four hundred tonnes of metal falling from the sky.’ We both giggled, and then tried to muffle it as we heard boots stamping along the concrete outside. ‘Go to sleep, girls!’ We lay still and waited. I closed my eyes. The bed squeaked again. Bethany said, ‘My brother has this book on serial killers. It’s really sick but you can’t help reading it. You know, the weird thing is that those guys say they don’t know why they do it. Some of them say, “The devil made me,” or “I heard it in the dogs barking,” but most of them don’t. They don’t know why.’ I opened my eyes. In the gloom I could make out the floral pattern on the underside of Bethany’s mattress. Tree branches bowed and tilted outside the window, making shifting shadows on the walls. ‘I reckon most people are a little bit nutty,’ Bethany said. ‘Like my mum, when she does the washing she pegs out different colours in separate parts of the Hills Hoist. There’s a whites and a darks opposite, and then blues and reds. Sometimes if she’s got a brown colour you can see her standing there frozen while she’s deciding if it’s a red or a dark. And if she runs out of room in the quarter, she won’t put it in a different quarter – she goes and puts it in the clothes dryer. That’s nutty, isn’t it? But she’s not killing anyone. I just wonder how fine the line is between pegging in colours to roasting small children, you know?’ ‘Yeah,’ I whispered. ‘You know what else? Psychos look like ordinary people. That’s what scares me the most. Except Ivan Milat. Have you seen pictures of him? He looks like a real freak. But the others – like David Berkowitz and even Martin Bryant . . . He just looks like a uni student. He looks like someone who’d play guitar. When I go through that book of serial killers and look at the pictures I always wonder if I saw one of them walking down the street, if I would know. The truth is, I don’t think I would.’
‘Unless it was Ivan Milat,’ I said. ‘Have you ever read a book on psychos?’ she asked. ‘I mean, have you ever looked up a book to see if . . . you know. It’s just those books only say stuff from the outside. They say things like, “experiences acute depression” or “exhibits irrational behaviour”. So how much is acute? How do you know if you’re being irrational? They don’t say what that feels like from the inside.’ ‘Hey, do you want to hear a joke?’ I whispered. ‘It’s not my joke. I heard it somewhere.’ ‘Go on, then.’ ‘There’s this guy and this serial killer walking through the bush, and the guy says, “I’m really scared,” and the serial killer says, “You’re scared? I have to walk back by myself!”’ Bethany laughed. Then we lay quietly for a long time. ‘Hey, Mackenzie, are you asleep yet?’ she whispered. ‘Mmm.’ She said, ‘I reckon the worst monsters are the ones you know.’ I lay in the dark with prickles up the back of my neck. In the patterns on the underside of Bethany’s mattress I saw faces – red faces, choking and purple. I closed my eyes and did my breathing.
Chapter 6 Alopecia There’s a girl at the camp who has big bones without much flesh on them, and thin lips, and she looks forty already. She wore one of those Cancer Council pastel cloth sunhats the first day, and then the next day – no hat. Her hair is a short, wispy mouse-brown, but dotted randomly over her head there are tufts of hair missing in perfect circles about the size of a twenty-cent piece. She caught me staring. ‘It’s called alopecia,’ she said. ‘What’s it from?’ I asked. ‘It’s usually stress-related.’ She blinked. There was even hair missing from her eyelashes. Later that day I saw her in the bathroom. She was sitting in the corner with her back to the tiles, stuffing pills in her mouth. I could feel the edges of an anxiety attack – the ringing in my ears and the mouth full of saliva – but instead of letting it wash over me, I lunged. We wrestled for the packet. Her fingers were white with the strain. The foil crushed in my hands. Her grip loosened and I tugged the packet away, holding her by the shoulder. ‘How many have you taken?’ I asked her while I folded out the foil wrapper. ‘Give it back! It’s none of your business!’ It was Vermox. I looked at her scalp again, at the patches there so pink and naked. ‘Do these make you bald?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Do they make you feel good?’ I asked her. Her thin lips turned down at the sides. The white residue from the tablets congealed in the corner of her mouth. She looked three and eighty at the same time.
‘If they don’t make you feel good, and they make you bald, why do you take them?’ I asked her. She whispered. ‘For the worms in my head.’ ‘And does it help? Does it fix it?’ She looked wretched – damned. ‘Shut up. I have learned helplessness. You can dob if you want, but they can’t take them from me. It’s over-the-counter. They can’t do nothing.’ I threw the foil wrapper at her and it landed in her lap. I knew what learned helplessness was. My counsellor told me about this experiment they did where these scientists put dogs in cages and electrified the cage. Then, after a while, they only electrified half the cage and the dog wouldn’t try to escape to the un-electrified half because it had learned helplessness. It sounded like a crock of shit to me. Besides, what sort of bastard wakes up in the morning with an experiment like that in his head?
Chapter 7 Trust Fall We had to do compulsory trust-building activities every day before lunch. On the first day my partner was the albino video-shop boy. He wrapped a blindfold around my eyes. The last thing I saw were his eyelashes, sparse and white, and his pale grey eyes that tilted upwards, making him look mean and piggy. He grabbed my hand and took me on a winding path to a tree to feel its surface. My tree was cool and unyielding, with pockmarks and divots. I ran my hand all the way around it and discovered a cicada shell clinging to the far side. Something stung me and I pulled my hand away. ‘There are ants,’ he told me. ‘Where your hand is now.’ ‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said. He led me back to the starting point. Those who had been blindfolded then had to pick their trees by sight. I looked across the lawn to where the trunks huddled together, stripped bare and pink and with a texture that looked like marzipan. Their old discarded bark draped around their roots in strips and sheets. I picked the telegraph pole a little to the right. Video-shop boy’s disappointment was not in keeping with the spirit of the exercise, I thought. He doesn’t know how many hours I’ve spent wearing eyeshades. On the second day we made a human machine. Bethany and I started because we were hungry, and no one else was going to do it. We stood face-to-face and put our palms together and pushed them back and forth. The boy they call Rumpelstiltskin joined in by bending at the waist and lifting Bethany’s ankle in time with our pushing. The Vermox girl then did air punches over his head, and so on until everyone made a part in the machine. I can imagine that if we were all wearing silver costumes and there was some funky industrial music playing and strobe lighting it would look really cool.
Callum was last. He stood at the edge and tilted his head from side to side, which I thought was a bit passive, and he’d only done it for a few seconds when Wendy said we could stop. On the third day we did the Trust Fall with Simon. We were told to stand on one of the tables in the mess room and fall off it backwards into the arms of the others. Callum was excused. He sat out in the sun reading a magazine and sweating. It made me cross. Trust was hard for all of us. But more than that, I knew that I would do an exercise that made me feel uncomfortable just to be close to him. When you pike out, I feel invisible.
Chapter 8 Workshopping it On the morning before my Solo we had another affirmation-dressed-up-as-creative-writing task to do. Bethany had gone on her Solo, so when I was deciding where to sit I sauntered towards Callum as though I was picking a spot at random. Callum was wearing what looked like suit pants cut off at the knees, a singlet, boots and a bowler hat. He also had a string of carved wooden beads around his neck. He smiled one of those brief closed-mouth smiles that you give to people when you are reaching across in front of them in a lift to press the button for your floor, or picking up the magazine they just put down in a doctor’s waiting room. Simon said we had to choose an object from our childhood and talk about it with our neighbour. He gave us a piece of paper so that we could ‘workshop our ideas’. I sighed. I’ve been workshopped before. Simon wasn’t going to fool me into some kind of personal revelation. I picked up my pen and scribbled the first thing that came into my head. When I was about seven, a friend of the family gave me a pair of eyeshades – the ones you wear on a plane to shut the light out. I would wear them around the house and pretend I was blind, trying to sense objects without seeing them. I wanted to learn how to use sonar like dolphins. Sometimes you can feel things, for example, wind across your skin, or your hair lifting off your face when you are near a door or a window. If you listen, you can tell the shape or vastness of a space by the quality of the sound. I experimented by talking into one of the kitchen cupboards and then in the lounge room – the biggest room in that house. Other times I would lie on the floor on my back and let the eyeshades take me places. I saw the most extraordinary things. I’d open my eyes in the blackness and feel my eyelashes flutter against the silky material. There is an old man with tiny strands of hair on his head, as though he’s walked through a spider web.
He’s shuffling along the street wearing nothing but baggy green underwear. I can see his sloping shoulders and his potbelly. His nipples sag. He has wispy white hair rolling across his chest like a cumulus cloud. I wonder if I’m simulating dreams when I’m wearing the eyeshades, or maybe I am actually dreaming, or maybe somewhere in the world there is an old man shuffling down the street in green underwear. Callum and I swapped sheets. Callum had written: A long time ago some kid threw a rock over a bridge and it killed a lady driving underneath. They built fences – nets above the bridge – to stop people throwing rocks at cars. You’d think people would know not to throw rocks. There was an overpass near our old house. The fence is about a metre and a half high. You could still throw a rock if you were determined to do that. If they really wanted to stop people throwing rocks they’d need to build a fence to eternity, or take away all the rocks. Where does that end? Does everyone walk around with a bulletproof vest and a crash helmet in case someone decides to do them harm? Wouldn’t you think people should know not to throw rocks at cars? At some point people have to decide not to throw rocks. Callum whispered, ‘Wow, yours is really good.’ I said to him, ‘I come from a long line of rock-throwers. You can’t stop people throwing rocks.’ ‘I come from rock-throwers too. Well, one rock-thrower, and one who just cowers in the corner waiting for it to stop.’ His chin jutted out and he stared me right in the eye. ‘If you could be the thrower, or the thrown-at, I know which one I’d pick,’ I countered. ‘But I don’t even think you get to choose.’ ‘Of course you choose!’ He was angry, but tired at the same time, as though I was a new enemy in an old war. ‘You think that’s the solution? You’re going to be a rock-thrower?’ My cheeks burned crimson. My mouth filled with saliva.
I had a feeling that if I stood up I would find that I’d wet myself. My counsellor tells me that during periods of extreme apprehension my mind manufactures physical symptoms of distress. I twisted in my seat. Now I couldn’t get up even if I wanted to. I let my hair hang across my face. Sometimes I can’t bear to be in my own skin. It’s like being embarrassed but ten times worse. I want to run until I have left myself behind, but I can’t run that fast. I feel stupid and childish, as if I am watching myself from the outside and I don’t want to spend time with me. That’s when I think about it. It’s not because I’m sad or depressed the way you see it in the movies. It’s as though I am so embarrassed that I have to leave. There’s only one way to truly leave. Sometimes it feels better if I drink. Sometimes it feels worse. I had cocaine once, and I’m sure that would do the trick, but I can’t do that because once I start I won’t be able to stop. Ever. I loved it. That feeling comes over me in waves. My counsellor calls it anxiety. She says most people have minds like ponds. They’re still most of the time, and they only ripple when something bad happens outside the pond. She says my mind is like the sea – it rocks and rolls, and if something bad happens it roars. Then I am trapped inside the waves, tumbling over and over and sure that I can’t breathe, wondering if it will ever end. When the waves in my mind are like that, I sometimes wonder if it would be easier just to give in. I could breathe the water. I read somewhere that drowning is a gentle way to die. I’ve researched these things, not because I am sad or morbid, but in case of an emergency – just in case one day it gets so bad that I have to find a quick way out.
Chapter 9 The Bogeyman Rules I’d been told to meet the counsellors in the courtyard straight after lunch to catch the bus to the Solo campsite. The first two people had already come back, and the second pair was waiting to be picked up. I was going out on my own. Even though I knew that the whole point was to be separated from civilised people by kilometres of National Park, I still would have preferred to go out on my own with someone else, the way the others had. Callum loped past from the direction of the mess hall. I looked away. I paced the stone pavers, pretending I was interested in the sparrows skipping on the sleepers edging the garden. I plucked a leaf from the tree above me and smelled it, crushing it between my fingers. It was grey and waxy. Eucalypt. ‘Don’t look so nervous.’ He grinned, slowing and heading my way. I’d watched him at lunch. He had muscles in his neck, and the suggestion of stubble, but I couldn’t see properly, because I was too far away. I was imagining the way he would smell if I rested my head on his shoulder. ‘I’m not nervous.’ I shrugged. Then I wished I hadn’t said that because I was obviously nervous. My hands were sweaty, my voice was shaky, and I could feel the perspiration on my upper lip. At least if I pretended it was because of the Solo he wouldn’t know. At the same time I wanted him to know, because he might say that he liked me too. But then I would go away and he might find that he liked someone else more – for example, Bethany. She had said some vague things about him, and neither of us had bagsed him. ‘You must know the Bogeyman rules, then.’ I tilted my head to the side. Too slow. He thinks I’m slow in the head. He’s just being nice to me the way you’re nice to the Year 7s at school. It’s a mercy thing. He started to tick off on his fingers. ‘No walking backwards and whimpering – especially not in a nightie. No saying, “Is somebody there?” when you hear heavy breathing from the bushes. And never,
never fall down if you are being pursued. You can get up but you’ll only make three strides before he gets you.’ ‘And you’ve got to keep all your limbs under the sheet. Did you ever do that?’ Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It wasn’t the same thing. It was a tangent. ‘I still do!’ Callum says. ‘I’ve got it under control,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t die. I’m the star of this show.’ ‘Really? What’s my role then? Do I come in just before the end and rescue you?’ I opened my mouth. I tried to think of something cool, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I’d been so proud of the star-of-the-show line. A good recovery from the tangent. It sounded spontaneous. It was a passable quip. I’m shit at quips usually. And now I had nothing. Instead I blushed and in that moment I lost him. There was a pause like a Chinese burn in the conversation. ‘Are you going to do a Solo?’ I asked. ‘No way!’ he grinned again. ‘It’s way too outdoorsy for me, and anyway I’m afraid of the dark. I’ve signed up for “Fingerpaint your way to healthy family relationships”.’ He waggled his fingers at me and I laughed. ‘Well, have fun then . . .’ He was searching – trying to remember my name. ‘. . . Mackenzie.’ I was glad he remembered. I still felt stupid, though. His name had been on my lips every night before I went to sleep. I felt the kind of stupid that makes you want to leave the country.
Chapter 10 Nesting It was a twenty-minute ride on the camp’s eighteen-seater bus from the main camp to the Solo site – just me in the back of the bus with the window open. Stefan and Wendy sat in the front talking. The wind whipped the words away so I could only hear snippets. Something about how she’d contributed an article to an environmental website. She wondered how they would overcome the commercial machine (or maybe she said ‘consumer’, or ‘corporate’). I stopped trying to listen and watched the trees closest to the road blur past my eyes instead. The paddocks on the way into the valley were a lush crayon green. The cattle were so fat their low, swinging bellies dragged the skin taut over their bones. They pitched and rolled on graceless legs and stared at us with faces so vague and crude they looked as though they’d been pinched out of clay. The trouble with crushes is the lows. The highs are fantastic when you’re having one, tripping on your own dreams. I’d run my few conversations with Callum through my head as if they were a movie – no, more like an ad – a thirty-second clip of myself being confident and desirable, speaking words that came out in the right order and with exactly the right inflection and well-timed provocative gestures. But then when we had actually played it out he never gave me the prompts I’d rehearsed. I’m in limbo, without a script. Spastic with panic, ad-libbing and it’s all wrong – nothing cool about it. Instead I seem desperate, sad, shallow and slow in the head. I’m reliving it over and over – the low zapping like a cattle prod and the dull numbness dragging like gravity boots. The worst part is when I think of all the things I could have said and done in place of the awful things I actually said, and then a new movie scrolls across my brain and I’m clinging to the hope, like a lowered cable in the dank mine-shaft of my humiliation, that I’ll have the opportunity to try again.
Just before I’d left he’d said that thing about rescuing me. I thought he’d been flirting, but now I’ve been thinking about it too much, how could I be sure that I wasn’t replaying it in my head the way I wanted it to happen? Soon the paddocks were behind us and we coiled along a narrow road, alongside the river. The vegetation rose up beside the road and enclosed us in a moist, mineral smell like green tea. Wendy jumped out and slid open the door for me. She handed me a duffel bag of supplies and pointed me towards a path snaking through the trees towards the river. I couldn’t see it, but underneath the bus engine’s idling I could hear the white noise of water rushing over stone. ‘Enjoy yourself, Mackenzie,’ she said, with a kindly expression. They all wear it. I’d seen it in art class. A Botticelli Madonna. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said, breathing in the earthy cool-ness. The craggy trees arched over me in slants and angles. There was a log across the path that looked as though it had been placed there to stop vehicles. Wendy stood behind me, waiting, and I suddenly felt claustrophobic and panicky. I was Gretel, abandoned in the woods, and out there were witches, wolves and giants, all hungry, and I had no defence against them but my wits. I’ve read all the stories. I don’t have those skills. I have never been any good at talking my way out of a situation. What would they think of me if I changed my mind? Could I go back to the camp now and admit I was scared by fairytales? ‘See ya,’ I mumbled. Wendy swung back into the cab. The path was soft and my passage along it silent because of a carpet of casuarina spines, damp leaves and twigs. At the end there was a grassy clearing about fifteen metres wide, and then a skirt of smooth, round rocks at the water’s edge. The river was narrow in front of the campsite – about ten metres across. Rocks and boulders jutted out of the water in haphazard lines and heaps, steering the water in lazy eddies, and then dropping away over shallow, choppy rapids into a pool below. Further upstream the river spread into a deep pool. The water surface looked turquoise, but from the edge I could see the brown and grey stones at the bottom and tiny fish 3 6 slipping between them. Slanting up from an arc of sand there was a large grey rock platform, patchy with lichen and pocked with hollows.
A crusty grill and dented billycan propped each other up like a pair of old drunks. Next to a circle of blackened rocks for a fireplace there was a tent in a bag. A square of flat dirt facing the river was obviously the place for the tent. I considered pitching the tent somewhere else just to be different, but there was no one to see, so I rolled out the canvas in the assigned flat spot. They’d given me a yellow plastic flag on a stick and a metal stand with three feet – a tripod. It was supposed to remain outside the tent, slightly to the right of the opening at all times, and I’d been told to drop the flag into it if I should require attention. That’s how they phrased it: ‘should you require attention.’ They didn’t use words like ‘distress’, ‘danger’, or even ‘help’. It might have put people off. Several larger logs had been cut up for me. They don’t leave axes lying about, not around ‘youths with potential’. They gave me a rubber mallet, though. Maybe that’s why they sent me out last? They’d given me twenty-five kilometres of isolation in case I went on a rubber-mallet rampage. I took a long time setting up the tent – one elephant, two elephant between each strike of the pegs with the mallet. I enjoyed building my nest. I suppose that’s why they left it packed up like this – to give us a sense of ownership. In the duffel bag there were vegetarian sausages wrapped in plastic, three raw potatoes, half a loaf of bread, a first-aid kit, two cans of baked beans, a tin of peaches, a carton of long-life milk, two packets of cereal, three apples and five teabags. There was a plastic plate, some tinfoil, plastic cutlery, and an enamel cup. No chocolate. They’ve given me matches too. They must think I’m safer with matches than hammers. The tent was taut and ready, the sleeping bag rolled out neatly inside, and my belongings set in symmetrical rows. Now what? I sat on the rock platform and stared at the water. The needles from the casuarinas dropped like light rain into the river, where they floated on the surface in sluggish swirls and corkscrews. Sometimes I could hear a branch crashing through trees on its way to the ground. It could have been a fox or a wild pig. Maybe a dingo.
Or a monster. The river was loud and after a while I had the sensation that there was a noise under it that I couldn’t quite hear, like a baby crying, a car approaching, or a mobile ring-tone. I tilted my head on the side to listen, but there was nothing but the roar of water over stones and the occasional birdcall. Lying back against the rock I watched the clouds drift over. Tiny biting midges hovered around my forehead, irritating like a forgotten word. I sat up suddenly, brushing the leaves and seedpods from my clothing, with no sense of how much time had passed. I built the fire and kept it going, feeding it one stick at a time – rationing it, and being attentive. Every now and then I would stand up and collect another stick, singing all the time, or humming to let the snakes know I was about. What did I sing? Something annoying. It was a jingle, ‘Be sure to go to Carroll’s, for the whole lock, stock and barrel. Be sure to go to Carroll’s, you’ll be fine’ – over and over. Although I wasn’t really hungry, I started to peel the plastic off the sausages I found in the duffel bag. Then I stopped and put them back. It seemed ridiculous that I was trying so hard to avoid what I’d been sent out here to do. What I’d come out here to do. (I hadn’t been sent. I’d volunteered. I could have done finger-painting.) I thought about Callum first. I imagined his face from every angle. I imagined him smiling at me over some shared joke. Better still, one that I’d instigated, shocking him into a delighted laugh – tipping the balance in my favour just for an instant. Good thoughts. The Solo had been a good idea. Then ugly, perverse thoughts barged in like bullies. All those thoughts I’d pushed aside, dammed, saw their opportunity to come out with renewed vigour. Refreshed, distilled and potent. In normal life there were all kinds of routines, obligations and distractions that I could use to push those thoughts back into their corner, until they were almost a ‘Where’s Wally?’ bad thought hidden amongst all the others, but out here there wasn’t a thing to distract me. That was the whole idea of going solo, wasn’t it? Still, I wondered if isolation could send you mad. Or is that the point? I’m already nutty and I’m out here to go sane. You can travel in your mind, if you give it the chance to do so. Faster than the speed of light. Tripping. Astral projection.
I’d already been to three of those secret hiding places that I’d avoided for a year at least. Each detail returned and magnified. The chemist’s shop. Dinner with the Winters. Nan and Pop. No wonder humans invented Nintendo. The difficulty is to decipher what’s real. I’ve done it before – hallucinate, manufacture, fantasise, lie, depending on your perspective. I can’t remember how much I fabricated. Unravelling.
PartT wo The Liar Paradox
(1) This sentence is false If (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, assume (1) is false. Because the Liar Sentence is saying precisely that (namely that it is false), the Liar Sentence is true, so (1) is true. We’ve now shown that (1) is true if and only if it is false. Since (1) is one or the other, it is both. ‘The Liar Paradox’ Bradley Dowden The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Chapter 1 Away on business When you are really young, you can make something up so well that you end up believing it. I used to tell people my father was away on business. When I was at Infants school we had a cottage at the beach that we visited on weekends, with a gardener who came to mow and trim hedges. I wore a hat and blazer to school, and the other girls were from ‘old money’. We looked like the kind of family whose father went away on business. After Infants, though, at my new school, I never invited home people who I had told the business-trip story. In Year 4 I told Rebecca Holdenstodd that my father had disappeared. She wanted to know all about it and asked me lots of questions. We sat cross-legged in the corner near the cricket nets with our knees almost touching while the Year 5 boys played a rambling game of footy nearby. My dad disappeared on one of those afternoons when the heat hung over you like syrup and the clouds draped across the sky were a greyish-green colour. There was a storm coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet. I knelt in front of the window and my dad was in the armchair reading the newspaper with one leg folded over the other and his glasses perched on the end of his nose as though he was an old Salvation Army volunteer rattling the collection box – the kind who sits outside the supermarket and shames people into giving their change. Every now and then Dad would turn the page and glance at me with the shame-look, because I was supposed to be finishing my homework sheet on skeletons and starting my BTN report. The last time he looked at me like that I said, ‘I’ll do it in a minute! OK? Jeez!’ I didn’t know that’s the last thing I would ever say to him. I was looking for old Mrs Katsourinis. Every day she stepped off the 417 bus across the road from our house in her long black dress and support-hose. Old Mrs Katsourinis had a face like a scrunched-up brown-paper bag. It was so rubbery and pleated that I was sure it was a mask. One day whoever was under there would lift it up to sneeze, blow their nose, or itch their eye. I didn’t want to miss it. This day, though, I didn’t see the bus. I didn’t see anything moving. Even the cat on the porch next door lay on its back with its legs splayed as if it was dead. Everything was so still before the storm it was as though the whole day was holding its breath.
Then the wind whooshed along the street pushing leaves and papers before it. It pressed against the oleander trees on the median strip. They’re poisonous, you know. My dad said you shouldn’t touch them. Some kids used oleander branches to toast marshmallows over a campfire. They got poisoned and died. The branches folded over sideways. The laundry slapped on the line and the tops of the wheelie bins smacked up and down in time. You could see the hail marching across the rooftops before it reached our house. I ran out into the back yard in my T-shirt and undies with a beanie on my head so I wouldn’t get sconed. I picked up the hailstones from where they landed on the grass and collected them in the wheelbarrow. I popped one ball of ice into my mouth, even though Dad always said I wasn’t supposed to eat them. I bit down and it crumbled between my teeth like the shaved ice you get in a snow cone, except it tasted sharp and metallic. After the hail stopped and all the ice balls were melting into each other, I went back inside. The newspaper was folded on the armchair and the glasses rested on it with their arms open, but my dad was gone. The next day I had hundreds of tiny bruises on my shoulders and on the back of my legs. The doctor thought it was hives from the shock about my dad’s disappearance, and I didn’t tell her any differently, because by then I was actually in shock and I’d forgotten all about the hail. I just sat there on the examination bed. The ones with the white sheet. You can tell it’s plastic underneath because the sheet slips all the time. I sat there and wondered why they didn’t use a bigger sheet so they could tuck it in, but then I thought they probably changed it every time someone new sits up there because of germs and it must cost them a lot in laundry detergent. Laundry detergent is expensive. That’s what I closed with. Stories sound truer if they have lots of details in them. Becca wanted to know where my dad was now and I told her I didn’t know. Maybe he was a spy? He could have been captured and tortured. She wanted to know if he was in Guantanamo Bay. Becca Holdenstodd told everyone that my dad was a missing person, and the next lunchtime I had to tell the stormy-night spy story to a larger crowd. I told it so well I even cried. Lorelei Darton told the teacher who was on playground duty that I was telling lies and he made us play soccer instead. Mr Lewis didn’t like my stories, or tackle footy either. The next day Becca wouldn’t talk to me. Neither would Lorelei, or any of the other kids. I tried to play soccer with them, but nobody passed me the ball.
After that I stood on the wooden seat near the stinkbug tree and sang songs to myself. I tried to lilt like Billie Holiday. If it rained I went to the library and read Mad magazines. At the next school I stuck to the away-on-business story and I never invited anyone home.
Chapter 2 Ward I hate waking up and not knowing where I am. This place smells like a vet clinic. There’s a sound – a persistent beep, like a barcode scanner in a supermarket. I open my eyes and the ceiling is made of squares, bordered by narrow metal strips. The squares look thin, as though you could lift them out with one hand. The bed I’m lying on is narrow and there is a plastic sheet under me that crinkles when I move. Then I remember. I had been curled up in a chair in the ward’s waiting room until there was a spare bed available. A woman was discharged and so a nurse put me in this bed. Opposite me is an old woman. She is glaring at me. Her cheeks are hollow. The beeping sound is the machine attached to her. She has plastic tubes up her arms and in her face. Her eyes are sunken and there are nasty purple marks blossoming under her skin – skin that is draped over her bones like unironed linen. Her shock of hair is the same colour as the pillows. She is so thin that if you couldn’t see her withered face and stringy, mulberry-stained arms you’d think she was a pile of rumpled sheets. To avoid her gaze I watch the mini TV hanging in the corner near the ceiling. There’s a game show on and somebody is winning a tropical holiday plus a home gymnasium package. I slide out of the bed and tiptoe into the hallway. I find Itsy. She’s sitting with her friend – the one she pretends to me that she doesn’t see because I don’t like him. He’s all limbs and he scuttles like a spider. We studied spiders in science class. They poison their prey. They wait until their quarry is helpless, and then they spit on them. Their spit melts the body and then they suck up the juice. That’s what Mum’s friend is like. He has all those long limbs and he’s waiting. Itsy is telling the nurses a story. She says it was an accident – a splinter that got infected. She’s told the real-estate agent a hundred times that verandah’s dangerous, but they never do anything, do they? It was a splinter and she took it out – most of it, she thought, but it couldn’t have been, because it went septic. She’d thought it would get better.
The nurses don’t say anything at all, but I can tell they know she’s lying because we’ve been through this before. They know what she does. They say they are using the maximum dose of painkillers. Itsy uses swear words in front of the other patients and I’m embarrassed. She says she’s going outside with her friend. The nurses exchange a glance. Itsy and her friend walk down the hallway. I was hoping that she would come to check on me first. As soon as she is around the corner they start to talk about her. Even the patients say what they think, and I don’t want to hear because Itsy is my mum and I love her. I slip down the hall and climb back into my narrow bed. The old lady and I stare at each other. A nurse comes to tell me Itsy will be five minutes, but she takes much longer than that. The nurse sits on the edge of my bed and strokes my hair. I close my eyes, but I’m not really asleep. When she gets up I see that she is crying for me.
Chapter 3 Tiger My dad’s a semi-professional golfer. He doesn’t play in the major competitions – just the minor ones. Mostly he goes around to different clubs giving lessons to really rich people. Sometimes he’s gone for weeks at a time on tours. When he’s away he eats at restaurants every single night. At home I have a whole bunch of soaps and hand lotions from all the hotels he stays at. One time there was a guy who owned this big company – they make tints for paint, or something like that. He asked my dad to go on an overseas holiday just to give him lessons, every day, at a tropical resort. I think it was in Vanuatu. It could have been Fiji. It was for three whole weeks, and Dad only had to give a lesson for two hours a day. We were going to go as well, but at the last minute I got the mumps.
Chapter 4 Cancer Once I told people that Dad was in hospital with cancer. All the people I told felt sorry for me, but it wasn’t like any kind of pity I’d met before. I liked it. I couldn’t bring myself to think it in the front part of my mind, but I was wishing that he did have cancer. If he’d had cancer, I wouldn’t hate him for leaving. There was another advantage to the cancer story, which was that I could genuinely say that I didn’t want to talk about it, and they would back off. It was a different sort of back-off too, as though they were backing away from a basket of sleeping kittens, rather than a huntsman that suddenly appears from behind a picture frame. I wanted to stick with the cancer story, but I had to consider the possibility that he would come back. I suppose he will, eventually. He will want us to pretend that nothing has happened. Or worse still, he’ll want to talk. He’ll tell me it wasn’t my fault really, and if he needs to say it, then it means he has considered that it might be. My fault. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to know that he has thought about it. He’ll want us to move to the country so he can grow wine grapes and be a yoga instructor. He might even have found God. At least we aren’t in the same house. In the old place he would have strutted around picking up things and moving them, like an old dog pissing on posts. He will have to familiarise himself with a new place – like a guest. Will he look like a cancer patient? I imagine him pale, drained, sapped, shell-like. He will be smaller. Reduced. Diminished.
Chapter 5 The Chemist’s Shop The chemist’s shop is bright with fluorescent lights hanging on chains over the tables, as if it was a pool hall. My dad is wearing his white smock with buttons at the shoulder. It’s dirty with dark grey handprints on the chest and at the hips, like newsprint. There are tablets in ziplock bags and in vials on the counter – yellow ones and blue ones. It looks as if they have funny marks like faces on them. Maybe they’re lollies. I lean over to get a better look and Dad says, ‘Careful, Possum’. I’m in my primary-school uniform – a pale blue tunic with a white Peter Pan collar. There’s a dried stain on the front from the melting chocolate iceblock I had at lunch, and normally that would be a problem because Itsy might not wash my tunic overnight, but today it doesn’t matter because tomorrow is sports day and I will wear my green pleated netball skirt and polo shirt, which I have already ironed and laid out ready. I bounce over imaginary hopscotch squares down the middle of the shop to pass the time while Dad finishes. There are customers on plastic seats waiting for their orders. An old man with sad eyes rubs at a terrible rash that scales up his chin and over his nose. There’s a young woman with a T-shirt that has ‘Kiss me before my boyfriend comes back’ written in silver sequins on the front. She’s jiggling a baby on her knee, and it makes a staccato gurgling sound, as though it’s riding in a car on a dirt road. I’m hoping tonight we can have takeaway from the shop around the corner. We’ll have hot chips and fresh bread for sandwiches. Dad will order a hamburger with the works for himself and two dim sims for Mum. The runner comes in. He takes a few packets off the counter. His job is to deliver the packets to the people at home who might be too weak or sick to come and get them themselves. He throws an imaginary stone and then hops along my hopscotch squares. I accuse him of stepping on a line and he lunges forward to tickle me. I squeal, turn, and run straight into the old man, who grunts.
Dad reprimands me, but I am already embarrassed. I sit on one of the plastic chairs and swing my feet. I have new teeth coming through. I can feel the sharp edge with the tip of my tongue. I’m watching the runner boy. He winks at me, not because I got in trouble but because we both did. I grin and it’s the first time I have ever looked at him and felt that he is family to me. Itsy will be mad at Dad for stopping at the chip shop on the way home because she’s been waiting for him to bring her medicine. She’ll shout at him and he’ll roll his eyes at me, at least that’s how it was supposed to happen, but we didn’t get to the fish-and-chip shop after all, because . . .
Part Three Travelling into flames
I had a dream about us In the bottles and the bones of the night ‘Can’t Run But’ Paul Simon
Chapter 1 Bugs I don’t feel alone out here. I’m surrounded. I’m an alien in a new country, unfamiliar with the customs. An easy target. During the day there are black flies that I’ve never seen before – sniper flies. They bite, and I don’t know until they’ve gone. An ant crawled up the leg of my pants and bit me in three places. I could feel the poison burning under my skin and I had to undress to get to it. I crushed it between my fingers, smelling the alkaline odour, and it waved its antennae smugly. The damage was done. I dabbed some toothpaste on my reddening welts. At night there are mosquitoes that hover over me like news helicopters over a train crash. Graceless beetles attracted by the firelight hurl themselves at trees and each other. Possums hiss and snarl like alley cats, shaking the limbs of the trees. Crickets clamour like a chorus of spectators. At dusk three green frogs hopped into my tent. I picked each of them up and their cold, clammy legs hammered against my fingers. Then when I turned off my torch I could see their silhouettes in the firelight as they clambered around on the fly-sheet catching the insects crashing into the sides of my tent with a sound like heavy rain. There are tiny money spiders hanging from silk trapezes, and an orb spider that in the evening wove her web in the archway between the top of my tent and the guy ropes. When I went to collect wood I found a spider apartment block – a network of flossy web spreading metres in each direction and at least half a dozen arachnids scattered over the surface, limbs akimbo. A finch bounced around the campsite. He found his reflection in the dented billycan and spent the next ten minutes challenging his little, dull, misshapen chum. Later a currawong settled on a branch and sang a melancholy cadence, but when I moved it flew away. I was not prepared for the death. It’s everywhere. Fish jump out of the river to catch flies. A bird stole a dragonfly from a spiderweb and then took the protesting spider.
I watched a lizard catch a grasshopper half its size. I could see the grasshopper’s legs thrash and then it was still. While the lizard stood in the open, struggling to swallow its enormous prey, a kookaburra swept down from a tree and snatched it. Predator becomes prey. There is no justice, only stealth, speed and opportunity.
Chapter 2 Siblings Scott arrived when I was about six. He was fifteen. He seemed a grown-up to me, tall and pale with a shock of red hair. He’d been in and out of foster care and juvenile detention homes for at least three years. No hippo-therapy for him. Itsy didn’t like him, although she pretended she did in front of Dad. It was only little things. If she made a booking at a restaurant, she’d book for three so they had to re-lay the table on the spot. If he was watching television, she’d flick through the channels to see what else was on. She turned on the dishwasher when he was having a shower. She didn’t have to do any of it. Scott and Dad were already awkward with each other – needing tools or sporting equipment to have something in common. Their pauses were a wretched search for something to say, whereas lulls in conversations between Dad and me were all about contentment. I could crawl into Dad’s lap. Dad tried too hard with Scott. He had a basketball ring installed above the garage and shot hoops. In the afternoons they went fishing together on the beach. Itsy would stand on the verandah and drink Blue Lagoons. Through a jigsaw of partial conversations I had over-heard I got the impression that Itsy was the reason that Dad wasn’t with Scott’s mother any more, but I was six, and while I knew on some level that my parents had existed before I was born, I also assumed that nothing important had happened until me. Scott only stayed a few months and then Dad gave him a job at the chemist’s shop and bought him a flat nearby. It was on the second floor. Scott had guitars on stands in the corner and there was always a pile of dirty dishes on the floor next to the lounge. Our ages were too different for us to play together.
Besides, he was a boy. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, he just wasn’t anything to me. He was like a fellow commuter on a train. You both look out the window. You make sure that no part of you touches any part of them. You make polite conversation if you have to, and then you get on with your life. I always dreamed of having an older sister. She would have a sensible name like Sandra or Cathy, and she’d walk quickly, as though she had lots of things to do and not much time. She would always have mints in her handbag. She’d boss me around about how I was going at school, and the clothes I was wearing, but in a nice way – as if she cared about my future. She’d insist that I cleanse, tone, moisturise, and wear sunscreen. My older sister would buy me something for Christmas that I’d forgotten I wanted, and when I opened it she would give me a secret half-smile of satisfaction that would be as good as the present itself. I’d go around to her place for dinner a few nights a week and on weekends, and we’d sew hems on curtains, try out new low-fat recipes, or plant basil and rosemary in squat terracotta pots on her large back patio. She would have a pool, and in summer I would go around to her place after school and swim laps or practise somersaults until she got home from her sensible middle-income job. My older sister would be a pathologist, a town planner, or a bank teller. When my sister came home from work she and I would lie around on inflatable floats listening to the drone of the pool vacuum as it twitched along the blue floor below us, and we’d bitch about Itsy. We could talk about Dad, or not, and she would know when to do which. She would tell me it’s not my fault, even though she knows the truth. The whole truth – not the re-remembered version. I don’t think I’d like a younger sister – besides, I asked Itsy about it and she told me that she’d had her tubes tied after me. Apparently I made her sick all the time and she put on fifteen kilos. She got acne and her legs swelled for the whole nine months. Itsy said she actually started smoking when she was pregnant because she heard it reduced the size of the baby’s head. ‘The baby’s head’ – that’s the way she said it. She was talking about my head. This is why a big sister would be better. If I had an imaginary friend it would be a big sister called Sandra or Cathy, but I’m worried about starting an imaginary friend, especially at my age, because I might develop multiple personality disorder. Besides, knowing my luck I’ll start an imaginary enemy instead.
Chapter 3 Trust Fund The downsizing happened quickly. I didn’t notice at first because our standard of living didn’t change so much. I still had new toys, new clothes and plenty of food in my belly. Then one day it was all gone and I didn’t have any of those things. Not long after Dad left, Itsy sold his car and put the beach house on the market. I went back there much later hoping that our beach house would still be somebody’s weekender, so that I might squat for a few nights, but it’s a belt of villas now. Itsy traded her Saab for a second-hand Barina. She put most of our furniture in storage. We moved into a cottage in a neighbourhood with a much greater ethnic mix than I had ever seen before. Itsy sold our house next. She didn’t discuss it with me, because back then I was a child and she was an adult and she made the decisions. I’ve only recently thought about how much all of these assets would be worth. On one of those cold winter days when the light slants across the afternoon sideways and the air is crisp and sharp like citrus, Itsy was chopping wood on the driveway at the side of the cottage. I watched my breath, cramming my hands in the pockets of a pale yellow parka with fake fur around the cuffs. I loved it but it was getting too small. There was a box of kumara on the front step – a gift from our Samoan neighbours, who had a substantial vegetable garden. Itsy split the wood and then I collected the pieces and put them in the basket to take inside. She told me I had a bank account and that Daddy had put money into it. She asked me if it was all right for her to use some of the money. Itsy looked me in the eye when she asked me, but her face was pinched and faded. She said she would only use it on things for us – on ‘living expenses’. I smiled and said that was fine. Of course, Mummy. (I didn’t start calling her Itsy until after she had spent all my trust.) I don’t know how much money was in that bank account. I suspect it was some kind of mechanism for hiding money, and if that was the case then it might have been quite a lot. My guess is over a hundred thousand.
It never occurred to me to say no, but even if I had refused, I’m sure she would have stolen it from me. Of all the things Itsy has done to me, it’s the memory of this day that makes me rumble full of hate for her with a thickness and force like boiling oil. She can make my present life a misery, but there is something particularly spiteful and uncaring about stealing my future as well. We stayed in the cottage for a while, perhaps three years, and then when I was about nine we moved into a unit. My cousin Drew came to stay. He was older – he must have been fifteen. He talked to me about music. I didn’t know the bands he mentioned but I pretended that I did. We slept in the lounge room in sleeping bags. I had a yellow one with cartoon characters on the inside and Drew slept inside the green one – the one I brought with me to wilderness therapy. Drew zipped it to the top, and then, with the hood over his head he stood up inside it and tucked his fingers in the corners. We were listening to Korn. He sang along to ‘Falling Away from Me’ inside this sleeping bag, wiggling his fingers and bobbing up and down at the knees, face all serious as he sang the words. He looked like a giant, bright-green caterpillar. It made me laugh so much that I wet my pants a little bit, and I wore the sleeping bag at least up to my waist for the rest of that night because I was embarrassed that there might be a pee stain. We made peanut-butter foldies for dinner. That’s pretty much all we ate while he stayed. Peanut-butter foldies, and when we ran out of bread, Iceberg lettuce with a dob of mayonnaise inside, which is just a foldie of a different kind. When I had run out of fresh clothes Drew tried to do a load of washing, but he must have put the hose in the wrong spot because it flooded the laundry. Water went out across the carpet and over our verandah, then dripped down onto the verandah of the flat underneath ours and the one underneath that. We grabbed towels and tried to soak it up. We were giggling even though I knew we would get into trouble. I rubbed the laundry floor, and at first I thought I’d rubbed the pattern off, but then I could see that the tiles were white underneath. I’d always thought they were cream and brown. The neighbour knocked on the door and we pretended we weren’t home. Leaning against the wall in the hallway, we covered our mouths with our hands, trying to keep from laughing. About half an hour after that the real-estate agent came, and when I could hear her jingling the keys outside, it stopped being funny and I started getting scared.
She stood in the doorway with her eyes wide and hand over her mouth. We showed her how we had turned off the machine and cleaned the laundry. She picked her way across the floor in her high-heeled shoes as though she was hopping rock-to-rock over a river full of snapping crocodiles. Then Itsy came out. The real-estate agent shook her head. Itsy’s face was puffy and screwed up. She said she was supposed to have notice of an inspection. They stood in the lounge room and shouted at each other. The estate agent wanted Itsy to buy new carpet. Drew took me to the verandah and covered my ears. He pulled silly faces to stop me from crying. I could still hear them, though, and see them through the door. He treated me as though I was a little kid and I liked that. I wish Drew had been around to cover my ears more often. He got a job in Alaska as a helicopter mechanic, which is about as far away as you can get. Itsy yelled that she’d been on night shift, but it was a lie because she hadn’t left her room for nearly ten days. At least, not when I was awake. Then the downstairs neighbour stepped inside the doorway. He and the real-estate agent exchanged a glance, and that’s when Itsy went nuts. She gave the real-estate woman a big shove – two hands flat on her chest just below her shoulders. The woman fell off her shoes into the neighbour and he lost his balance too. They scrambled out the door and Itsy slammed it behind them, still screaming and swearing. I went to school the next Wednesday morning, and in the afternoon went home to a different flat. I don’t think Itsy paid for the carpet. I’m pretty sure she left that place in a big mess. She was always wrecking other people’s things. I remember once she ran into someone’s car in a carpark. She drove out of there as fast as she could. I told her that she was supposed to leave her number on their windscreen. ‘Who are you, my mother?’ she asked. ‘They’ve got insurance.’ Itsy looked glamorous, but something underneath was decayed and you knew if you pressed too hard it would all crumble away to dust. Now I think of Itsy like a penguin in an oil-slick – clogged, miserable and without any hope of saving herself.
Chapter 4 Breaking up with Mum Itsy said, ‘This is not working out for me,’ as though I was optional. She said she needed some time to herself to work things out. Space. It wasn’t me, it was her. I wanted to punch her in the face, but I didn’t. My hate bulged inside my guts and along my limbs and made all my muscles sore. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. I remembered that she had been strange for a few weeks now and I wondered if I had failed some test she had set for me – a worthiness test. I thought about all the things she had asked me to do. Set the table. Clean up your room. Run down to the shops. I hadn’t done all of them, but I would have if I’d known it was a test – if she had said, ‘Hang out the washing, Mackenzie, or I will leave you and never come back.’ This wasn’t a test. She wanted a fresh start. A new day with no mistakes in it like Anne of Green Gables, and I was a hangover from the old mistakey day. She didn’t want me and I could have punched her, but I also could have fallen on the floor and grabbed her around the ankles and begged her to take me with her. I didn’t do either, I just stayed lying on my bed at a funny angle, skewiff, with my knees facing the wall and looking at her over my shoulder. She was standing in the doorway with one hand on the handle. She was biting her cuticles. It’s disgusting the way she eats at herself. I remembered the time when I was seven I went to Gregory Oldberger’s birthday party. It started at two in the afternoon and everyone else had gone by five. Itsy didn’t pick me up until eleven o’clock the next day. She said she thought it was a sleepover. Such a liar. She made me stay with the Oldbergers, who I hadn’t even met until that day. They said grace before they ate and I didn’t know what that was.
In the morning Mrs Oldberger told me to have a shower and when she locked me in the bathroom, I was terrified. My family showered in the nude, but maybe people who said grace before they ate kept their clothes on? Their shower tap only had one lever. It was too hot, but I stood under it and cried, and hoped none of the Oldbergers would come in and see me naked. My mother said that she didn’t think our relationship was working out. I lay twisted and didn’t move, or say anything, even though I could feel a pain in my lower back and my mouth was twitching. I couldn’t stop it from doing that. I said ‘OK, see ya,’ and turned around as though she had said she was going out for milk rather than that she was breaking up with me.
Chapter 5 Backwards, or maybe sideways The bay smelled of salt, fresh pippy shells and dried-out seagrass. From the top of the hill I could see the buoys above the crab pots, bobbing and dipping on the water’s surface. Moored yachts rolled lazily from side to side in the chop, pulleys clanking against booms. The afternoon sunshine flickered across the water so brilliantly that I had to shade my eyes with my hand – a salute to old territory. As I trudged down the long driveway past the garage my schoolbag bumped against my back. There was a blister on my heel and with each step I pushed hard into the toe of my shoe, trying to lessen the rubbing. The door to my old room was open. The bunk beds were unmade and two small boys in board shorts were lying on the floor on their stomachs playing Snakes and Ladders. Their legs were deep caramel, and encrusted with sand. They peeked up at me, startled, with huge black eyes. They looked Indian, or maybe Sri Lankan. The older one offered me a brief, wary smile. I turned the corner past the old vinyl swinging chair. The screen door creaked as it opened and clattered closed behind me, just as it had all those years ago. ‘Nan!’ I called out. She appeared around the doorframe holding a spatula. ‘Mackenzie!’ I laughed. ‘Hello, Nan!’ When we hugged I realised that I was taller than she was. ‘What are you doing here, love?’ she asked. ‘Can’t your favourite granddaughter drop by for a visit?’
I joked. She pulled away from me, holding me at arm’s length. ‘No, really?’ I sat down at the kitchen table. There was a fruitcake on a plate, sliced and covered in Gladwrap. I helped myself to a piece. She wasn’t supposed to ask me straight away why I’d come. I had imagined that we’d hang out for a while and talk about nothing – maybe watch some TV together. Nan likes the soaps. I could help her cook dinner, cutting things up on the plastic cutting board at this table while she slow-waltzed around the kitchen. I wanted to work my way into the place backwards, or sideways. Better still, we could not talk about it at all. We could prepare the meal, eat, and then, after a few games of cards, she would send me to one of the guest rooms around the corner. Not my old one, obviously, there was a family staying in that one. But there was room at the back. They never put anyone in that one unless they had to because there was only one window and the opening into the roof cavity was in the corner of the ceiling. Also it backed on to the bathroom and Nan thought you could hear people ‘using the amenities’. I didn’t care about that, as long as she let me stay. I could float into the place and stick like a barnacle to the underside of their life. Nan was waiting for an answer so I told her how Itsy broke up with me. At the end she patted my wrist with her dry hands that had twisted knuckles. In that small space between us there was peace and familiarity. Then she stood up and waddled over to the corner cupboard to pull out the Yellow Pages. Slapping it on the counter, she licked her finger and turned over the pages, flick, flick, flick. She found the page she wanted and slid it under my nose, pointing to the bold typed headline: Women/Youth refuges. ‘How about you give them a call? Use our phone. Or I can ring if you like. I’m sure they’re very nice people. They must talk to kids with your sorts of problems every day.’ It hadn’t even crossed her mind to offer. The screen door clattered and Pop came inside. He paused and then opened his arms wide. I fell into them, trying to hold onto my tears. ‘Hello, poppet!’ He rubbed my back. Over my shoulder Nan filled him in on my predica-ment.
‘Why doesn’t she stay with us?’ he asked as he released me. Nan blinked, holding the phone in her hand. A look passed between them and I realised that the idea had crossed her mind and she’d dismissed it. ‘Mackenzie doesn’t want to stay with us,’ she assured him. ‘Couple of old fogeys like us? No! And we don’t have the room, anyway – not right now. It’s too far to school and there’s only one bus a day. This isn’t a place for teenagers. These people are very nice.’ She held up the phone, as though it was evidence. ‘They must have to deal with kids like Mackenzie every day.’ Kids like me. Youths with potential. ‘Don’t be silly, Pop! It will probably all blow over. You know how Mum is.’ I smiled as widely as I could. ‘It’s no biggie. I have a friend who I can stay with. She’s waiting for me now, actually. I’d better get going!’ My lips were stretching back from my teeth as I backed out the door. I didn’t think they could possibly be fooled by it, but they pretended to be. They let me walk out. Afterwards I wished I’d cried and begged them to take me. They would have had to say yes if I’d done it that way, and it wasn’t even pride that stopped me, but manners. Civility. I didn’t want to embarrass them. I waited at the park around the corner until it was dark, and then I crept through the garden past the garage and slept in the boatshed. I wrapped myself in an old tarp. The lights from the house lit the lawn in rectangles. I could hear the Sri Lankan family with their two little boys playing Trouble. When I thought about it later, I knew they wouldn’t have me from the start. That’s why I’d hoped I could work my way in backwards, or maybe sideways.
Chapter 6 Couch-surfing There was a girl called Mellinda at school. She was quiet and had a habit of bundling herself in her school cardigan. She would stretch it out in front of her until the seams were straining, and then she would wrap it tightly around her, holding it with her crossed arms as though she was wearing a straitjacket. Mellinda lived in a granny flat behind her parents’ house. She had a sofa bed. I slouched up to her in Science. We were testing whether various household products were acid or alkaline. I leaned so close that our elbows were touching. ‘You know, this might actually be useful. More useful than rat dissection, anyway. How often are you going to need to do that in your life?’ Mellinda murmured in agreement. She had the earpieces from her iPod dangling around her neck and I grabbed one and held it to my ear. ‘I’ve never heard this before. What are you listening to?’ She blushed. ‘It’s um . . . Do you like it?’ ‘Yeah, it’s great! Who is it?’ Mellinda stared at the table and folded her litmus paper over and over into little triangles. She spoke in a whisper. ‘I have this, ah . . . program on my computer. It’s not special or anything. You can get it on the Net, and then you just record sounds, and cut little clips from other things and loop them.’ She shrugged. ‘This is you?’ She nodded and chewed her lip. ‘Oh my God! I was so sure it was, you know, a proper CD. Is it? Have you sent this to anyone, like a studio or something? Do you have a recording contract already?’
Mellinda laughed and then covered her mouth with her hand. ‘No! It’s just for fun. I haven’t. I haven’t shown anyone.’ ‘Nobody? You mean I’m the first? Seriously? Wow! That’s kind of an honour. Thank you so much! So how do you do it? Do you think I could have a try? This is amazing! You’re
amazing. Can I hear another one?’
‘I could show you how if you wanted.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not that hard.’ ‘That would be so great. Are you busy this arvo? Can I come over? I don’t know if I could do it, but I would love to watch how you do it. If you’re not busy.’ The trick to couch-surfing is to find someone who is too polite to tell you to leave – the sort of person who is flattered by high-volume attention. Mellinda’s sofa bed was lumpy, but I was able to throw my washing in with hers. Then her ‘uncle’ came to visit and I knew by the blushing and the cardigan-bundling what sort of uncle he was. He told me he had a spare room in his house. I could stay there for as long as I liked. He stroked my hand and licked his lips. When I flicked a look at Mellinda her face was distorted as though she had a tic. Emotions played across her face – relief, rage, and then a kind of bewildered jealousy. Between twitches I could tell what had happened. He’d told her that he didn’t normally do this sort of thing, but she was so desirable, so fresh, so attractive that he couldn’t help himself. He wondered if she knew how truly beautiful she was. He’d asked permission for one small thing at a time. ‘Can I run my fingers through your hair?’, ‘May I touch your feet?’, ‘Let me stroke your back’, and at first it would have seemed reasonable. Then there would come a point where she was uncomfortable, maybe even hurting, but then he would have told her that he couldn’t possibly stop now, and besides, she had let him do that other stuff – this wasn’t really any different. When he went away she would have been ashamed and confused. ‘Was this how it was?’ she would have wondered.
The ads told her it was. The ads said that you should buy make-up, and colour your hair, and drink Coke so that you will be the sort of attractive that men can’t resist. It was pretty shabby, but then so was menstruation. All the girls in those tampon ads wear white and play sports and beam as though it wasn’t interfering with their life in any way. Maybe sex was the same? I stood at the window and watched the uncle walk down the driveway. He was high-stepping and humming, tossing his keys in the air and catching them. He gave me a cutesy waggle-finger wave as he got in the car. ‘You’re not going to let him do that any more,’ I told Mellinda. ‘If he even leans too close, you say in a loud voice that you’re going to phone his wife. Tell him that if he comes near you again you’re going to ring his boss and take out ads in the fucken Daily Telegraph.’ Then I looked for a different couch in a household where there was no uncle or neighbour, or brother, or cousin, and every now and then I found one.
Chapter 7 Wily Once I was staying at my friend Emily’s house while her mother was away. Emily was drunk and when she passed out on her bed I took off her shoes and covered her with a doona. Then I went downstairs to the guest room. I stripped down to my undies, pulled on an oversized T-shirt and then I saw a reflection in the window. Emily’s older brother Joshua was standing in the doorway. I could see his erection through his clothing. He grinned. ‘I think we should have sex.’ I knew he meant to whether I wanted to or not. For a moment I panicked. I had to find a way out. I had to think fast. ‘Oh no, I’m too drunk. Maybe another time,’ I laughed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bedside lamp with a heavy base. I sat on the edge of the bed so that it was within arm’s reach. It was attached to an extension cord, which was even better. I wouldn’t have to unplug it before I sconed him with it. Joshua sat next to me and kissed my neck. I could smell the beer on his breath. ‘I hardly know anything about you,’ I said. ‘We can have sex if you want to, but first tell me a secret.’ ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he mumbled. ‘I know that your father died last year,’ I countered. He sat back. ‘That must have been really difficult for you,’ I added. ‘I haven’t talked to anyone about that,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to?’ ‘No, I want a root.’ ‘OK, but after you tell me about your dad.’
So we sat there together until five in the morning, sharing beers, and Joshua told me how hard it had been. He even cried. At the end he thanked me. Initially it had been a wily means of escape for me, but now that I think back, it was probably really good for his mental health.
Chapter 8 Metaphorical Ducks My counsellor doesn’t use the word ‘problem’. She says ‘challenge’. I am a smorgasbord of challenges. I’m kind of a sampler kit of disorders for social workers. You name a challenge and I will have brushed against it at some time or another – but just a little bit. I’d make a great practice youth for novice social workers before they moved on to bigger cases. I’ve stayed with foster-families. The first time was after the incident that happened at the chemist’s shop, and then the next was for four months last year. The first time was OK, but the second family didn’t want me there. I think it’s because I was too old. Or maybe it’s because I ate too much, and not at mealtimes. I would wait until everybody was sleeping and I’d sneak into the kitchen. I’d get a big platter from the cupboard and fill it up with a little bit of everything in the fridge – one slice of ham, one teaspoon of Vegemite, two pickled onions, two slices of bread, a handful of frozen peas and a dob of tomato paste. Just when I was about to close the fridge door I’d spy something else – a stick of peperoni, say – and hack off a good eight centimetres. In the pantry cupboard I would select a sheet of lasagne, a muesli bar, an apple and two dried apricots. I’d sprinkle the whole lot with breakfast cereal and a squeeze of honey. This second foster-family had a breakfast bar. I would squat down behind it in the corner where nobody could see. The telephone cord dangled just above me. I’d sit in the dark and eat my plate of little deliciouses with my fingers, delicately feeling for each morsel and placing it in my mouth – just holding it there and running my tongue over it, feeling its texture and temperature. Afterwards I would quietly wash up the platter and put it back in the cupboard. I’d go to the bathroom and kneel before the bowl. I haven’t made myself vomit yet, but I always think about it. I’ve heard other girls say that the stomach acids coming up all the time rot your teeth. I like my teeth. Besides, if I stick my fingers down my throat or buy laxatives then I will have the sort of ‘challenge’ I’ve promised my counsellor that I’ll talk to her about. Nobody noticed my bingeing. The foster-mum suspected. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She didn’t like me lurking around the house at night. She thought it was creepy. I don’t like foster-homes. I prefer to couch-surf.
I’ve never had to sleep on the street. I’ve worried about it, though. The school counsellor knows. She’s given me a key to the showers at the back of the PE change room. But we never connected, not the way I did with my court-appointed counsellor. I knew why. One of the first times I was waiting in the school counsellor’s office I had Mellinda’s iPod. When she came in she asked me what I was listening to. It was Billie Holiday. She gave me an indulgent smile as though she owned Billie Holiday and I was just borrowing her. Now I can’t listen to Billie Holiday without thinking about it and I hate her for stealing Billie Holiday from me. So when she asks me questions, I lie or deflect. Sometimes I cave and need her, and then she pretends to misunderstand and gives me careers advice to pay me back. Sometimes the Home Ec. assistant, Sally, lets me wash my clothes in the machine that is used for the teatowels and dishcloths from the school kitchens. Sally is discreet, which I appreciate, but she doesn’t want to hear about my life. If I start to tell her things she fidgets and turns her back, pretending to be busy. Mostly I couch-surf, but a couple of times last winter I caught a train to Mount Victoria and then back again. All the way from Strathfield to Emu Plains I looked into people’s back yards. It was like seeing the houses in their underwear – people in slippers bringing in their washing, kids on tricycles and swing sets, cockatiels in cages, unsorted recycling, unmown lawns. As the train jolted past Pendle Hill station there was a lady on the top floor of an apartment block wearing lycra and doing aerobics along with the television. I saw a man in Lidcombe walking around his house in socks, with his pants unzipped, and another man in Schofields breaking up large trays of seedlings in his greenhouse. I imagined the front of these houses tidy and whipper-snipped, with the curtains drawn in neat, even pleats. When I see those grey-layered bundles hunkering at the bases of buildings, I can’t help but stare. I wonder where I will go when I run out of boatsheds, couches and long train rides. It fills me with dread and a horrified recognition. I imagine myself looking out from the crazy, dirty face of the old woman with stringy tendrils of hair whipping around her neck. Is she really as old as she looks? Where did her story begin? What would a homeless person do if they were agora-phobic? What if you had to sleep in a park and you were arachnophobic? Can you only afford to have a phobia if you have a home?
You could get a pet duck. Ducks eat spiders. I don’t think it would walk on a lead, though. You’d have to carry it. I wonder what sort of phobias I will discover that I suffer from. Fear of cold. Fear of bacteria. Fear of being robbed. Fear of people looking at me the way they look at homeless people. Androphobia. I looked that one up. I would have to find myself a metaphorical duck. What would you do if you were afraid of spiders and ducks? You’d be stuffed.
Chapter 9 Pippies Itsy wasn’t always the way she is now. We used to go to the beach house every weekend. She was a sun-soaker, lying with her bikini straps splayed across the towel, shading her eyes and reading a fat paperback. I would sit at the water’s edge with one of my dad’s T-shirts over my swimmers, heavy with water, encrusted in sand. Dad would call me ‘Mackenzie Schnitzel’ when we came inside. I made mermaid castles by dribbling the wet sand from the tips of my fingers into folds and curlicues. After I made a whole mermaid palace complex I’d call to my mother and she would run over the hot sand on the tips of her toes to look. If I looked up I would often see Dad sitting on the front deck with his shirt open, drinking a beer. For lunch we would have hot chips from the surf life-saving club, eating with our mouths open so we wouldn’t burn our tongues. Mostly Dad would come to eat with us, unless he was with business associates. Then at the end of the day, when everyone else had already gone home, Itsy and I would chase the waves to catch pippies. I’d laugh at her on her knees digging like a dog. We would collect them in a bucket, vowing to take them home to cook, but we only ever caught a dozen. When we were exhausted we’d tip them out and watch them slip sideways into the wet sand and disappear with a wink. My mother doesn’t love me because she’s a junkie. Junkies can only love people temporarily. They are emotionally nomadic.
Chapter 10 Darkness As the darkness stole the afternoon away I drank three, four, five mugs of tea from river water in the billycan, which was a mistake. I cooked half the sausages on the wonky grill and ate them with my fingers. I wrapped a potato in foil and threw it into the flames. After what I imagined to be an hour, I took it out again. It was blackened on the outside and raw in the middle, but when it had cooled enough to hold I ate it like an apple. Despite Wendy and Stefan’s advice, I built the fire until the flames licked up to the height of a man. It was too hot to sit by. For a few minutes I stood at the edge of its heat and felt the darkness press against my back. Then I sat inside the door of my tent and waited. The fire died down a little and I stretched out on the bedroll in my sleeping bag. The river is much louder at night. I zip up the front of the tent, listen to the white noise and watch the firelight play across the fabric above me. A shadow falls between my tent and the fire. I see the shape of a man standing with his hands on his hips. It looks sharp, like the silhouette of open scissor blades. It flickers for a moment and is gone. All my muscles are rigid, my jaw locks. There is a man out there – a scissor-man. Bethany’s serial killer. I can’t see anything in here. I’m listening, but the sound of the water pushes against my ears and grates inside my head like steel wool. I kneel in my sleeping bag, my muscles uncoiling like a spring, and slowly unzip the tent flaps. I take a deep breath and then rip them back. There is no man. I lie still with my heart throbbing in my throat. After a long time I see a sprite flit over the stones at the edge of the fire. She is tangerine orange, naked – childlike – no bigger than the span of my hand. She has yellow eyes, split up the middle like a cat’s. She flutters a forked tongue at me through sharp, shiny metal teeth like nails. There is a small boy at the edge of the path, standing underneath a tree. He wears a top hat and white make-up like a mime artist. He wipes tears from his black eyes.
There is a woman pacing where the water laps against the stones. She wrings her hands. She’s wearing a nightdress that clings to her skin. Her dark hair is wet and sticks to the side of her neck, but when she turns towards me, I see that it’s not hair but masses of long black leeches. On the other side of the fire there is an older boy – almost a man. He’s choking. His face turns so red and bloated it’s almost blue. The capillaries pop in his eyes and they fill with blood. His tongue is swelling. He retches and retches and the foam runs down his chin. I close my eyes, but I can still see them. I imagine them lurching towards me. My bladder burns like a hot stone. Mosquitoes buzz around my ears and bite the corners of my lips. I put my hands to my cheeks. The mosquitoes sting my knuckles and settle on my eyelids. I lie still staring at the dying fire, like the figure in Munch’s Scream, waiting for the morning.
Part Four Truths
I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers. ‘Irresponsible Hate Anthem’ Marilyn Manson
Chapter 1 Balancing the Universe Things aren’t as ‘Poor me’ as I might make out. I’m a liar. I’m not even honest with myself. Sometimes when I’m close to the truth I just re-remember it a different way. I’m vain and greedy. I’ve been promiscuous in bouts. I’ve betrayed. I’ve stolen lots of things. I taxed Mellinda when I left. I took the iPod with me. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Adults – my counsellor, my social worker, my school principal – can throw their hands in the air, exasperated. ‘We just don’t know what to do about you, Mackenzie.’ And I think, ‘Good! That means I’ve won.’ I can justify most things, at least in karmic terms. Every day I see other people my age who have won, just by being born into the right family. I have been set up to fail. I have all the excuses in the world. I’m in the lowest percentile range, the long-term, repeat-offender, intergenerational transgressor. I’m locked in the rock-throwing cycle. I’d lost before I was even born. Every now and then I deserve a few wins of my own – the occasional skirmish towards balancing the universe.
Chapter 2 Taxing the Guidmans We lived next door to the Guidmans for a while. One time when they went for a holiday to Coffs Harbour they asked me to feed their cat. The first day I retrieved the key from its hiding place under the third potplant, I went into the house, fed the cat with the first tin they had put on the counter and then I left. The second day I went into their house, and after the cat had finished eating I walked around their house. I sat on the lounge and watched a cartoon. I looked in their medicine cabinet in the bathroom and smelled the perfumes on the dressing table in the main bedroom. I kept waiting for the front door to open and for them to find me. It was exhilarating. The next time I went there I sprayed on one of Mrs Guidman’s scents and then I looked in their bedside tables. On Mr Guidman’s side there were some porno mags. I went through the pockets of all the jackets in their wardrobe and altogether I found thirty-six dollars forty in small notes and change. I left two dollars in loose change, but took the rest. Before I left, I tried to put everything back exactly the way I had found it. I went home and sat on my bed stinking of Mrs Guidman’s perfume. I curled my fingers around the money in my pocket and felt the way religious people must feel when they think they are going to hell. I felt damned. Sometimes if I had nothing else to do on a Saturday morning I would wait until the Guidmans had gone grocery shopping and I would go into their house using the key that they left under that pot for all eternity. I bet it’s still there. I would take money from Mr Guidman’s jacket pockets. I also discovered a jar of coins on the shelf in the laundry. I must have taken hundreds from them over the years.
I took one of Mr Guidman’s porno mags and sold it to a boy from my class for ten dollars. Another boy found out and wanted me to get one for him, but I sold him a bottle of the Guidmans’ gin for thirty dollars instead. The Guidmans never caught me, but the idea that they would was so exciting that it sent shivers over my whole body and made my heart beat fast. Sometimes I would wait until I heard their doors thump closed in the garage before I would leave. Rollercoasters have nothing on a bit of petty theft for kicks.
Chapter 3 Lorelei’s Shoes That girl Lorelei Darton from primary school knew I was a liar. In year 4 I stole her shoes. One sports day I saw her pull them out of her bag. She laid them on the seat next to her carefully, because she was proud of them. They were white and sky-blue with a shiny silver stripe along the side and heart-shaped silver buttons around the sole. They were new and when I saw them I wanted them. When everyone was paying attention, I told Lorelei that I had a pair of shoes exactly the same. I asked her where she got them and when she answered, ‘Rebel Sports,’ I nodded. ‘Yeah, me too.’ Two weeks later, on sports day, I wagged till playlunch and then I went into the classroom and took Lorelei’s blue and silver shoes from her sports bag. I put them on and then I hid my plain black shoes in the bushes behind the photocopying room. Then I snuck around the back of the teachers’ carpark. I came in through the front gates just as the bell went and caught up with Lorelei as she headed towards class. I waggled my foot. ‘Now we can be twins.’ Lorelei smiled back, but it was a tight, closed-mouth smile because she thought she was better than I was. At lunchtime Ms D’Antoni asked me if I’d stolen Lorelei Darton’s shoes that morning. Lorelei stood behind the teacher with her arms crossed and an ugly frown like a scar up the middle of her face. I let my mouth drop open. ‘I told her ages ago that I had a pair exactly the same. Ask anyone. And besides, I wasn’t even here! Lorelei saw me come in wearing these shoes.’ Ms D’Antoni asked me to empty my bag. I whipped the zipper around and shook it, letting everything spill on the asphalt. A pencil case and ruler, two library books, an empty drink container with a splash of cordial in the bottom, a brown, wrinkled apple. No shoes.
I stared at Lorelei. ‘Apologise to Mackenzie,’ said Ms D’Antoni. Lorelei’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sorry.’ She couldn’t figure out how I’d done it. ‘That’s OK, Lorelei.’ I smiled at her. I knew that Lorelei knew, and she knew it too. I wore those sky-blue shoes every day, even though I got a note home for being out of uniform. Lorelei owed me those shoes for being so stuck-up and snooty. Besides, her parents would buy her a new pair. Itsy never would. Even now I’m not sorry. I enjoyed getting the better of Lorelei Darton, and the only person who really suffered was Lorelei’s mum or dad or whoever paid for those shoes, and they probably deserved it too, for thrusting their stuck-up, snooty daughter on the world. They should have bought a pair of shoes for every kid in my class.
Chapter 4 Firebug I knew Nan and Pop had room for me, and I would have earned my keep. I could have helped them around the house – done cleaning and cooking and lifting when Pop got too old for it. I would have been grateful and loved them. I could have paid them too, if it was about money. I’m pretty sure I could have got rent allowance or Austudy, once I had a permanent address. I wouldn’t have run away from them either. They were fakers. They put on caring as though it was a costume. A few weeks after that afternoon when they should have taken me in but didn’t, I caught a bus to the park near their place. I waited until about two in the morning and then I went to their house. I snuck down the side and into Pop’s garage. He had red cans of petrol for the ride-on lawnmower. I grabbed the petrol can and poured some on the ground under the lawnmower, as if it had leaked. Then I got the long matches they have for the barbecue and I set fire to it. I ran up to the top of the driveway. Once I was on the road, I stopped. I could already see the flames flickering between the palings of the shed. There must have been plenty of flammable things in that garage. I could hear it too, whomping and crackling. Big fires are noisy. I never realised. I yelled out, ‘You pair of old fuckers!’ as loud as I could. Then I sprinted away from there until I thought my chest was going to explode. Afterwards I slept under one of the upturned tinny boats in the park near the water. I could hear the sirens. I stuffed my fingers in my ears and sang something other than Billie Holiday. I wondered if burning down Nan and Pop’s garage made me a pyromaniac, but I’ve heard that pyros stay around and watch what they burn. Besides, I did think about other things first. I thought about trashing their letterbox or sinking their boat. I thought about spray-painting ‘Stupid, mean old fuckers’ on the front of their house. But they could just buy a new boat, or paint over the wall. There was something more intimidating about a fire. A warning. This could have been your dining-room curtains.
It wasn’t about the fire. It was about Nan and Pop. I had nothing and I needed them. They should have taken me. Besides, they had insurance.
Chapter 5 Splinter When that nice nurse left the room crying, I called her back. I dobbed. I told her that it wasn’t a splinter. Itsy had tried to inject stuff between her toes, but it hadn’t worked. It festered there for days. It blew up and went red, and then it popped and smelt really bad. Itsy screamed and punched the walls. She screamed all night, and kicked and shook, partly because she had a disgusting foot, but mostly because she had run out of stuff. She got the bone-ache. Itsy went to hospital partly for the disgusting foot, but mostly because she knew they would give her morphine. This had happened before. She always brought me with her and I would have to find a place to sleep in armchairs in waiting rooms, or spare beds if they had one, because there was nowhere else for me to go. I told the nurse and the nurse told me that they already knew that, but a hospital is not a jail. I cried because this time I had dobbed and nothing happened. I don’t know if it’s worse when something happens or when nothing does. I lay in the spare hospital bed and had my dream that’s way better than lying on a tropical beach with the sand under my back and the waves folding over each other. I had my dream where I’m adopted by Angelina Jolie.
Chapter 6 Baskets Nan and Pop weren’t actually my grandparents. Everybody called them Nan and Pop. They owned the corner shop. Itsy used to send me down there to buy milk and cigarettes. They sold smokes to me as long as Itsy had written a note, even though it was illegal. After they sold the shop they made their house into a bed-and-breakfast. My mum left me there. She said it was overnight, but she didn’t come back for a week. The time I stayed with Nan and Pop it was just like the Oldbergers, except at least I had met them before. My counsellor would say that setting fire to their garage definitely tipped me out of the simple oppositional defiance disorder basket into some more overtly aggressive conduct disorder. I haven’t told her. I shouldn’t have burned down their garage, but I still think they could have taken me.
Chapter 7 Incident at the Bakery Attendance at the wilderness therapy camp wasn’t voluntary. The court had ordered me there for intensive intervention after the incident at the bakery. Apparently my escalating aggressive and dissocial behaviours were well outside the normal range for my age and socio-cultural context. There was a French bakery run by a Vietnamese family in the strip of shops near our school. It was the type of bakery with the counter across the front, with sample loaves and a tasting plate on the top, and the customers waited on the footpath to be served. I was truanting, but it was lunchtime so it didn’t count. There were a few people ahead of me, so I stood behind them jangling my coins in my school skirt pocket. A man in a short-sleeved shirt with a skewiff tie walked in from the side and stood at the counter next to the other customers. Once the others had been served the baker asked who was next, and I said, ‘I’ll have a cheese and bacon roll and a strawberry milk, please.’ Short-sleeves glared and tutted. I said, ‘I was here first.’ He said, ‘You were not!’ I said, ‘Ask anyone. I’ve been here for ages. I saw you come while I was waiting. You came from that way.’ I pointed down the footpath. The woman who was just turning away from the counter with her arms full of loaves looked at Short-sleeves and rolled her eyes. Bitch!
I gave her a shove. It was a big shove – two hands flat on her chest right below each shoulder. She had her arms full so she lost her balance and fell down. Her head made a satisfying doonk noise as it hit the glass display case. Then I grabbed the sample Pane di Casa from the counter and I smacked Short-sleeves on the side of the head with it. His mouth opened and I thrust the loaf at his mouth. I said, ‘Here! Have it! Have your fucken bread!’ It didn’t fit, of course, it was too big and solid, but it crushed and crumbled against his face. He had flour and crumbs in his eyelashes and on his shirt. Later at the police station, they called in a shrink and he asked me if I had suffered some kind of cranial trauma as an infant. What the hell? I was there first!
Part Five Descent
And she’s got a little tin cup with her heart in it To bang along the bars of her rib cage ‘Fierce Flawless’ Ani di Franco
Chapter 1 Vertigo That man shaped like scissors is back. I’m not ready to see yet. I’m making some noise – rasping breaths – or maybe he is. It is so close inside the sleeping bag – hot and stuffy. I can feel moisture beading on my skin. I’m breathing my own exhaled breath and centuries of other people’s sleep-sweat and feet-stink. It’s moist and sour. How many bacteria must be tucked within the sleeping bag’s flannel seams? It makes me a little light-headed. Tinnitus. Neon lines on the inside of my eyelids like the ‘Mystify’ screensaver. I’m going to suffocate. It’s hot and salty. I’m running out of air. I can’t breathe. I have to get out. Now. I can’t. I imagine he is a giant. Fee, fie, fo, fum. Bald, with no neck and fibrous stubble almost up to his eyes. He’ll have ragged, grimy fingernails on the end of huge, meaty hands the size of dinner plates. He’ll breathe fetid breath through sharp incisors. He’ll wrench my leg from its socket and tear the flesh from it as if it were a chicken drumstick. He’s a narrow, delicate man – seven foot tall. He has lank, greasy blond hair over his shoulders. He has robes hanging from his skeletal frame. He fancies himself a priest or a judge. He has high cheekbones, pale eyes and long fingers. They’re scaly and dry, like a bird’s legs. He will tie me to a rack, puncture my jugular and drink from it with a straw. My disloyal heart, clutching and releasing in triple time, will gush my blood into his mouth. It will run down his chin until there is no more, and I will be left a desiccated husk. He’s a beast. A dogman. Curved ripping claws. Snapping teeth. Thick, dripping saliva. He’ll disembowel me. He’ll gobble my steaming guts while I’m still alive. He’s talking. He’s not a giant or a beast. It’s a high, reedy voice like a surfer’s or a jockey’s. I imagine him short, thin-skinned and lean, with muscles strung to his bones. Agile. Gollum. He talks so fast and high that sometimes he stumbles and has to start again. I can’t hear properly. All I can hear is my own breathing and a shrill ringing in my head. I have to concentrate. He
doesn’t make any sense. I’m trying to put the words in a different order to make sense of them in my head, but it seems he’s plucking syllables out of the air. He’s going to eat me. He’s going to rape me. Maybe both. My head buzzes and jangles, and panic immobilises my limbs. My heartbeat flutters in my neck like a frightened bird. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth the way my counsellor taught me. I’m gasping. I’m hyperventilating. My head is full and whirling. My counsellor says to take a time out when I have an anxiety attack. She tells me to say, ‘In two three, out two three’ when I take breaths. She tells me to tense and relax each of my muscles, starting with my hands, going up the front of my body and then all the way down the back to my toes while imagining that I’m lying on a tropical beach. I usually start by feeling the sand under my back, and then I imagine the waves folding across each other in foamy sheets. My counsellor says I’m supposed to say ‘Relaaaxxx’ in a low, slow voice. letting out all my tension in a long hiss at the end. But I’m not on a tropical beach, I’m in a sleeping bag like a straitjacket listening to this gristly man. I’m falling in my head – reeling, churning. I try to hold out my hands to break my fall, but they’re stuck to my sides. I’m spinning. I can feel it in my ears. My heart hammers faster. Bright spots appear before my eyes. The ringing gets louder and louder until I can’t sense anything else. I’m making a noise now. It’s kind of between a wail and a shriek, and it’s piercing. My screaming cuts through the still night air and everything else – all the night birds and marsupials, even the river – stops, listening and alarmed, but I can hardly hear it through the ringing in my ears. I’m rocking. I’m squeezing my eyes shut, but the hot tears make my whole face wet. My fists are so tight I can feel my nails cutting my palms. It feels good. I’m safe inside all that noise.
Chapter 2 Red I’m screaming and then I stop. The silence suspends us. Then crickets chirrup, a night bird calls and the river flows again with a sound like distant applause. I know him. He’s been in my mind since I was eight years old. He’s my monster. He’s stringy. He has hair in greasy tufts climbing out of his shirt and up his neck. None of the boys I know have hair like that. It makes him a man – a sweaty, smelly man. He smells like onions. It’s a smell that sticks to your skin and the inside of your nose – clinging there and climbing, like the hair on his neck. There’s thick, dry hair on his arms and on his legs and on the insides of his wrists, but further up his forearm there’s a bald patch with an old home-made green tattoo that has bled out and faded. The bald patch is the worst of all. It looks like ringworm. He’s red – red hair, red skin, the whites of his eyes are red. Most people with colouring like that have blue eyes, but his are a muddy grey. He has white scunge in the corner of his mouth, elastic, stretching when he talks. He hasn’t stopped talking yet. He keeps calling me by name. Every time he does it, I flinch. He’s not a giant, a dark priest, or a beast. He doesn’t have supernatural powers. He’s just insane. ‘It’s time, don’t you think?’ It’s the first thing he’s said that I’ve understood. I shake my head again. ‘I can’t help you.’ I shrug, trying to be nonchalant, but I’m still inside the sleeping bag with my heart beating and sweat rolling down my back, because he’s going to do something. I’m trying to breathe slowly the way my counsellor taught me. ‘You’ve got me mixed up with someone else,’ I tell him. He stares at me. ‘Poss. Possum.’ ‘Not me,’ I say. ‘You don’t know me.’
My instinct says I should wait to see what happens next, but another part of me wants to give in – roll into a ball, rocking, moaning, crying, or maybe thrashing, kicking and screaming those long, loud, high-pitched screams of an over-tired two-year-old. I blink the tears out of my eyes and sniff. My throat is sore from all the screaming, and I’m the sort of tired you feel when you are woken instead of waking. I can’t think because all my thoughts are incomplete and jarring, like a CD that’s skipping. I’ve changed my mind about facing my demons. As I stand up, my cramped muscles and joints stretch out. The sleeping bag drops around my legs and then I’m scrambling out of it. The Red Man grabs for the back of my shirt, but it tears and he’s left holding a handful of fabric. I throw myself through the flaps of the tent. I hit the ground hard. My ankle twists, and the pain streaks up my shin. He could reach me if he stretched out his arm. ‘Possum!’ he calls out, as though I’m a dog. The fire has died to grey embers. I run past it into the scrub. I close my eyes and imagine I’m wearing my eyeshades. The rocky ground bites my bare feet. A branch grazes my shoulder. He’s right behind me. I can hear him breathing. Adrenaline floods my limbs and numbs the pain. I run faster. I lean forward and run as hard as I can. In four steps I’ve picked up some speed. I’m going to make it. My shoulder smacks the trunk of the tree. I bounce off it and into the Red Man’s arms. He wraps around me like a steel strap. His breath is moist on the back of my neck. I can feel the stink of him clambering all over me like busy hands. I scratch his arms and he lets go. The idea of his skin under my fingernails makes me want to vomit. He scolds me as if I am a child. ‘Don’t you run away. Naughty girl! Naughty, naughty girl.’ He punctuates the last word with a slap across my face. My cheek crackles with static and the hot welt rises in gooseflesh, like braille. He pauses in shock, and then he hits me again. Over and over – open-handed slaps across my face, and then down my side. Horsebites on my thighs. I sink to the ground and curl into a ball, covering my face.
Now he closes his fists. He’s kicking me too – grunting with the strain. Sometimes he misses and only scuffs me but most of the time his boot connects with my flesh with a thwack. I lie as still as I can and eventually he stops. This is the part where my mother would fall on me again, but this time with tears and kisses. ‘ I’m sorry, baby. You shouldn’t make me mad like that! Oh, my sweet baby girl.’ Not the Red Man. He picks me up around the waist and drags me back. We’re not finished.
Chapter 3 Positive Scenario Projection I remember the Red Man. He’s not supposed to age but he has. He must be twenty-four now, or twenty-five. I froze him in time in my memory because he was dead. I was waiting in the chemist’s shop for Dad to finish so we could go and get a chip sandwich. Then the sirens came and the mood changed – not an expected, slow change like a storm brewing, or a joke heading towards a punchline, but abruptly, like a car accident. The woman with the baby was crying. She was screaming and there was snot coming out her nose but she still jiggled the baby, who was crying too. There were sirens and the Red Man – he wasn’t nearly so red as he is now – had foam coming out of his mouth. He’d eaten all the smiley-face pills on the counter. He’d opened the vials and the little ziplock bags and poured the pills down his throat. He was crunching them with his mouth open and his eyes wide and my dad didn’t try to stop him. I remember thinking that they must have been lollies after all. My dad just stood there and shook his head with a look on his face as if he was watching a dog eat its own vomit. There are tears on my face. The slaps still sting on my skin. I’m cross-legged in the tent. We’re face-to-face, but I’m trying not to look. The Red Man is watching me. ‘You can see how my unresolved issues manifest into violence now, can’t you?’ He clicks his fingers in front of my eyes, ‘Oi! Mackenzie! Can you see it, or not? Say it.’ ‘I see it.’ ‘Do you know I went to see him?’ he asks. ‘I went there to that place and he . . .’ The Red Man waggles his finger at me. ‘ He couldn’t see me !’ He snorts again and shakes his head. ‘So I said. You’ll see me. You’ll see me. You’ll see me! ’
He nods his head slowly for a long time. His lips are pinched into a line and he’s staring through me. ‘They’ll come looking for me,’ I tell the Red Man. ‘If you let me go now I won’t tell.’ I’ve been concentrating on the tripod outside the tent lying on its side. There would be patrols, they said. I’ve had my eyes closed doing what my counsellor calls ‘positive scenario projection’. There are running footfalls outside. The Red Man has been dozing. His eyes are puffed. The canvas is pulled aside and Callum kneels on the threshold. He’s wearing a singlet. The way he’s holding the tent material I can see the muscles along the back of his arm flex. He looks at me and relief floods his face. He lunges forward and the Red Man cowers. He grabs him by the collar and shakes, yelling into his face. ‘Did you hurt Mackenzie?’ He raises his clenched fist, but then lowers it. ‘You’re not worth it.’ Callum skids towards me on his knees. He wraps his arms around me. ‘Are you OK?’ I nod and then rest my head on his shoulder. He holds the back of my neck. He smells sweet and spicy. ‘Everything’s all right now.’ I lift my head and touch his face. I can feel his cheekbone under my thumb. I place my pinkie finger in the cleft on his chin and then his mouth crushes against mine. I hear a low, whining sound. I think it’s an insect at first, but it’s too steady. It gets closer and I can tell it’s a helicopter. The Red Man lies flat. He wriggles forward to peek through the opening and the spotlight washes his face. He panics. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s sweat on his face. The blades cut the air outside and throw small rocks and branches against the fly-sheet. It billows like a sail, straining against the pegs. Then we hear the voice through the megaphone. ‘Please exit slowly.’ The Red Man starts to cry. He’s left the door flap open and I can see the police in their vests and helmets swarming through the bush. When the police come I’ll be on the news. I’ll have to do an interview on the radio. People will ring to see how I am and send flowers and chocolates. He speaks and I’m startled out of my thoughts. ‘Wake up.’ He clicks his fingers again. ‘They’re going to look for me, you know,’ I tell him again.
The Red Man shrugs. ‘They will, but not for a while and not for long.’ I lift my chin in defiance, but I think he’s right. I’m a recurrent runaway. It’s written in my file, along with my other ‘challenges’: chronic truancy, depression, anxiety, borderline eating disorder, impulsive risk-taking and frequent antisocial behaviour, possible substance abuse, suspected attention deficit disorder, occasional evidence of self-harm, paranoia. Potential for violence. In my file there is the list of therapies that my youth behavioural management committee have agreed upon – hypnotherapy, hippo-therapy (that was fun, though it didn’t heal me), mentoring, family mediation, foster care, emotional growth boarding program, independent living program, wilderness therapy. Why would they bother? No one would miss me. They will probably all be glad. ‘You know Dad’s not coming. I can’t help you. You might as well let me go.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m confident that you will get the message.’ We stare at each other again. It’s getting stuffy in here. His stink thrusts itself up my nose and down my throat and makes me nauseous. A car rumbles to a stop outside. I hear the handbrake, and then one door slams. A pair of feet scuff through the grass. A man clears his throat. ‘Can I come in?’ my father asks. He crawls inside and smiles at me. ‘Hi there, Poss. I won’t be too much longer.’ He squats in front of the Red Man and takes a small bottle out of his pocket. He shakes it between thumb and index finger. With his other hand and his teeth he peels back the wrapper from a syringe with practised ease. He fills the syringe from the bottle and flicks the bubbles to the top. The Red Man holds out his arm. Dad slides the needle under his skin. Then he places his thumb over the puncture. ‘There now. Don’t you feel better?’ The Red Man nods. ‘You keep this.’ He folds the Red Man’s fingers over the bottle and then ruffles his hair. ‘There’s a good boy.’
Dad stands up. He slips the cover over the syringe and slips it into his pocket. He holds out his hand to me. ‘Time to go home, Possum.’
Chapter 4 Disclosing The fire makes shadows on the Red Man’s face like bruises. His mouth is a mean slash across his face – brooding. He’s ready for an excuse to let his unresolved issues manifest themselves. He sighs and rubs his forehead. ‘You’re not trying, Mackenzie.’ ‘I don’t know what you want.’ ‘Yes, you do.’ ‘What?’ ‘We’re workshopping it.’ I close my eyes and speak slowly. ‘Every now and then when my school counsellor is pushing me, I tell her lies. She writes it all down in my file and I can see her lining it up against all the other things in there. She nods as though it all makes sense now why I behave the way I do. Then at the end she puts her hand on my arm and asks if I feel better having worked it through. Sometimes I tell her lies, but mostly I just withhold information.’ ‘Like what?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know, just junk – junk she would say was important. Every time something happened she would bring up that one thing, as though it drives everything I do instead of that it’s just one more shitty thing.’ Another recollection bubbles to the top, ugly and putrid like methane from a bog. I’m trying to turn it off like a light and imagine the sand under my back. I can hear the waves on the beach, but it’s not blocking out the bad thought. Sometimes if I hurt myself really badly it can stop the bad thoughts. I concentrate on the dull ache in my legs, but it’s not enough and now it’s too late. This is what I came out here to do. When I stayed at my friend Emily’s house and her brother Joshua came in after she was asleep, I was drunk.
I was very drunk. I wasn’t able to talk my way out of it. Joshua raped me. I’ve never told anyone – not my social worker and especially not the school counsellor because that is called ‘disclosing’ and they would be obliged to tell DOCS or the police or both, and then it would become a matter for investigation. The school counsellor would know and the principal, the deputy, the office staff, the DOCS person, the police officer and all their husbands and wives, brothers, sisters, neighbours, friends. Each person would swear not to tell, but they would tell at least one other person, because in their heads, even while they’re swearing it, they don’t consider that telling their husband or their sister is telling someone else, and the further away from me each of these people get, the more people they would tell. There would be speculation and debate amongst the mothers over coffee and banana muffins in the shopping centre across from the school, and amongst the staff at Friday-afternoon drinks at the RSL. Some would say that I consented and then changed my mind afterwards and claimed rape, as if calling it that means it didn’t really happen. Most would agree that I consented and was then disappointed that the relationship didn’t go any further so I cried rape out of revenge, because Joshua was normal – middling-to-high-range socially and academically, and a strong swimmer, whereas everybody knew what sort of girl I was. Later Joshua told a few of the other boys that he’d ‘had’ me. When I heard I just curled my lip and said, ‘Yeah, in his dreams.’ I did have a slight crush on Joshua before that night. It was no raging obsession, but when his eyes followed me I felt pretty and desirable. I flirted with him. I let my hand brush against his when we walked side-by-side and held eye contact longer than was polite. I even had a few daydreams about having sex with him. It’s true. I was disappointed, because there’s no type of relationship you can have after a rape. You can’t be mates with your rapist, you can’t even be nodding acquaintances. I couldn’t still be friends with Emily either. I was humiliated because, after all our flirting, Joshua thought so little of me that he didn’t even want to keep the option of friendship open, even though I was at the same school and would probably run into him every day. I was physically and emotionally disposable.
At university the school counsellor had read textbooks and case studies and learned how to work through situations like this one, but she wasn’t there that night. She doesn’t understand that no amount of ‘working through’ will change what happened. Talking about it lets him force his way into my head as well. Besides which, even if I did go through with it, there is a conviction rate of two per cent on sex crimes in this state. Two per cent. What’s the point? I choose to remember that Joshua and I shared a beer and he told me about his dead father.
Chapter 5 Stalking India ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve done?’ the Red Man asks. I shut my eyes and shake my head. I’m so tired. I just want to sleep. ‘What, Mackenzie? What have you done?’ ‘I stole from the Guidmans.’ ‘No.’ ‘I set fire to Nan and Pop’s shed,’ I whisper. He’s in my face. I can feel the moisture from his breath on my cheek. ‘No, no, no! You’re not trying.’ I swallow. My throat is dry. I want to tell this one. There’s pain in it, but it feels good, like squeezing a zit. ‘There’s a girl at school. Her name is India Kavanah. She comes top in all her classes and she has lots of friends. She goes out with Jazz MacEachern. She’s a Barbie doll. You know – long blond hair with no split ends, perfect skin and straight white teeth. India still looks good after PE. She’s tall – taller than I will ever be, but nice. She doesn’t get involved in the bitching. India writes songs and when she sings at assembly people cry. I . . .’ ‘Go on.’ I clench my teeth. ‘I want to punch her face in.’ His eyes are bright and he’s leaning forward. ‘She speaks French. She has tap dancing on Saturday mornings, because she can dance too. India is always the lead in Rock Eisteddfod. So on Saturday mornings I go to her house.’ His face is eager. ‘And?’
‘I break into her house and I go through her stuff.’ He waits. Eventually he says, ‘That’s not all.’ ‘No.’ Tears well in my eyes. ‘It’s not even a very nice house. It’s not as nice as our house used to be. It’s not impressive like Katie Winter’s house. It’s just ordinary, but it’s always tidy and they have family food in their cupboards – lunchbox packets of chips and snack-size chocolates. Her mum makes slices. Their fridge is neat. They keep their leftovers in proper Tupperware containers, not just cling-wrap over the plate. The Kavanahs don’t have expensive furniture, but there are family portraits in the lounge room – mum, dad and a goofy younger brother with freckles, and then India looking happy and flawless.’ ‘You’re stalling.’ ‘I hate her. I hate her so much it’s as though there’s a brick in my guts even when I think about her.’ ‘What do you do, Mackenzie?’ ‘I go through her stuff. I take things sometimes. Or I break things.’ ‘What else?’ ‘There’s nothing else.’ ‘Yes, there is.’ The tears spill down my cheeks. ‘I leave notes. Mean notes. I put them under her pillow and in her socks. I scrunch them up and shove them in the pocket of her blazer. I tell her I’m going to come back at night and slit her throat. I say I’m going to throw her dog in front of a train.’ ‘Why, Mackenzie?’ ‘Because I will never be as good as India at anything. She makes me feel stupid and ugly. She makes me feel like shit,’ I blurt. The Red Man doesn’t answer. ‘That’s not the worst thing you’ve done, is it, Mackenzie?’ I shake my head, but I haven’t finished. ‘And do you know something? She has no idea that it’s me. I’m so low to her that I can go right into her house. It’s as if I’m invisible. I can walk right up to her face and she doesn’t even see me.’
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve done?’ ‘I’ve told you.’ ‘No. You’ve done worse than that.’ He grabs me by the hair and lifts. I squeal with shock and pain. It takes my breath away. ‘Tell me!’ My eyes squeeze shut. I feel a bead of moisture run down my cheek. It could be sweat or a tear. I hope it’s not blood. He loosens his grip a little. One time in Year 3 I stayed over at Katie Winter’s house. Her mother picked us up from school in a dark green car that was done up with white leather inside. Katie lived on the top of what Dad called ‘Persnickety Hill’, because her mother came from old money. Lots of girls from that school had old money. I didn’t know why Katie had invited me, because we hadn’t played much before that. The other girls said that their parents told them not to play with me. They said our family was nouveau riche, and apparently that wasn’t as good. 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.
Chapter 6 Praying 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.
Chapter 7 Lone 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.
Part six Going sane
Sinner, there is no such thing Beginner, I have learned to sing Forever I must walk this earth Like some forgotten soldier. ‘Sinner’ Neil Finn
Chapter 1 Choked 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.
Chapter 2 Dobbers wear nappies 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.
Chapter 3 Calves and cars 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. I walk and walk. Halfway up a winding hill I stop to roll up the legs of my pyjama pants. My shins are sweaty and I’m wishing for water.
I reach the crest of the hill and on the other side emerald paddocks peppered with black-and-white dairy cows take my breath away. There are fences of wood encrusted with lichen. Old gates tilted with age prop against chunky grey posts. It looks like an ad for butter, or fruit cordial. The cows have yellow tags on their ears. They stare at me vacantly and warily. In the distance I can see a kelpie nose-down and trotting – patrolling its borders. A calf jogs towards me, pauses and then springs away with its tail in the air – its belly jouncing up and down. I don’t think I have ever seen any creature so civilised and domesticated. My eyes fill with tears. Beyond the paddocks there is more scrub and the road snakes through it. I’m not ready for the bush yet and I’m tired from walking. Instead I carefully climb through the barbed-wire fence. It snags my clothes and hair. I stop to unpick myself from its grasp. In a dense patch of cropped grass I lie down, eyes closed and arms flung out like a starfish. Blades of grass fold against the back of my neck and tickle my earlobes in the breeze. The inside of my eyelids are vermilion. I throw one forearm across my eyes, but I can still sense the change in the quality of light when a cloud passes overhead. Insects chirrup rhythmically, and every now and then the calves call and the cows groan in return. I hear the whisper of feet moving through the grass towards me. The Red Man. The man shaped like scissors. My monster, not in the night-time, electric-cage of my mind, but outside, out here in the daylight. My heart thumps and adrenaline shoots through my limbs. I sit up suddenly, opening my eyes. For a second the world is overexposed and saturated with colour. I see my curious calf hurtling away across the field. Thirty metres away he skids to a stop and wheels around, snorting at me, and I laugh as I rock back onto my elbows. It feels good and it will take some getting used to. Then I stop and tilt my head. I say the word aloud and it sounds stupid, like a birdcall. Car. There’s a car coming. I scramble to my feet and sprint for the fence. I have my leg cocked, ready to climb through when it occurs to me that I don’t know who it is. I lie down in the grass on my stomach and think. The car will be something small, sensible and white – the safety colour. It will be an elderly spinster. Her clothes will be starched. The car will smell of hot vinyl, lanolin and baking. She will be wearing sand-coloured Pollyanna shoes and beige stockings,
but it won’t hide the dark purple veins climbing up her legs like twisted vines. The flesh before her toes will bulge above the leather. On the back seat there will be a Tupperware container of homemade scones wrapped in a teatowel. She’ll be going to town to see her daughter-in-law who has a new baby. It will be a grey ute. The tarp over the back flaps and the passenger window doesn’t close properly and whistles. It will be a farmer with a daughter about my age. He will have just bought her a new pony for her birthday. He’s going into town to the produce store. He’s bought two boxes of bees. He’s never kept bees before. The car is louder now and when I catch my breath I peek around the fence post to the road. It’s a dark green four-wheel-drive with tinted windows – a Pajero. I squint at it but I can’t see inside. It could be a businessman commuting from his hobby farm, talking on his mobile phone and cursing at the bad reception out here. It could be a mum with a two-year-old spilling Popper juice all over the back seats. I’ve never been good at asking for help before. It’s always gone badly. Anxiety scratches at my neck. I’m doing my breathing. There’s no way of knowing until you try. I wait till the car is nearly in front of me and then I stand up, waving my arms. There are 20 543 840 people in this country. They can’t all be bad. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance.
Chapter 4 Running The brakelights flicker twice and I think it’s going to stop, but no, it’s slowing to go round the bend and then the Pajero is gone. I’m feeling disappointed, relieved and foolish. I walk across the paddock to where the cows have settled under a tree. They ogle me nervously, but only the calves scamper away. I lean my back against the tree. I could sleep here. I would love to sleep. My throat is parched and I can imagine the tissue inside cracking into fissures like a dry riverbed. I’ll get up and find the river soon. I’ll drink from it, even though the counsellors told us not to, unless we boiled it. I’ll rest my eyes first. Even through my eyelids I can sense the branches swaying, letting the sunlight dapple my face. I don’t have any sense of time passing, but I’m jerked awake. ‘Poss!’ The voice whispers. I’m groggy, but I know only one person would call me that. Even before my eyes are open properly I’m scrambling backwards on the heels of my hands. He’s leaning over me with a look in his eye that’s almost tenderness. ‘Get away from me!’ I yell in his face. The animals lum-ber to their feet in alarm. They thunder away and I can feel the weight of them through my hands. I clamber to my feet and run. I can feel his hand reach for my ankle, graze the skin, but he misses. I run across the field, glad of the soft surface. I look over my shoulder. Scott is standing under the tree with his hands on his hips. I’m drained. I knew escaping was too easy. I knew the whole time. I’m running. I don’t know why I’m running because he will always find me. He’s my monster.
Chapter 5 Throwing Rocks at Cars I’ve found my star picket. I’m stumbling through the bush, leaning against it periodically to get my breath back. Valderee, Valderah, Valderee, Valderah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. When Scott comes for me again I’m going to stab him – probably in the guts where it’s softer. I’m going to stuff him in a hole. Then I’m going to go back to my campsite, eat a can of baked beans and wait for my bus. That’s what I came out here to do, because it’s all about what you can get away with. It’s not about justice, only stealth, speed and opportunity. I’m practising my breathing. My legs are shaking and I can’t stop them. I lean against the trunk and the bark presses against my back. I can feel ants climbing up the inside of my shirt. I grip my star picket so tightly that my fingers have gone numb. He’s coming. I can hear him wheezing and gurgling as he runs through the bush. I can hear his feet scuffing through the leaves and the crunch and snap of twigs under his feet. He’s getting closer. I could let him pass. I could squat down and wait till he’s gone. I will find my way out. I could leave him here. Then what? In two three, out two three. I have to do this, or he’ll chase me for ever. Even if I lock the doors and bar the windows, in the night when I wake up I’ll wonder if he’s in the kitchen in the dark, waiting, or stealing down the hallway. Every time I close my eyes I’ll hear him. He’ll be around the corner of every street. He’ll be on the other side of every tinted window. He’s close now. I can smell him. His footfalls are so close I can feel them through the soles of my feet. I take one more deep breath. Then he’s there. Right by my side. He passes me. I whirl my stake around and crack him across the back. He stumbles and lets out a yelp. I thwack him in the calf. He falls and rolls away from me. I
rush forward and hold my stick to his chest. He looks up at me, frightened. The veins in his forehead are raised and I can see the pulse in his neck. I jab him hard with the picket. I feel it connect with bone. I stab him again, hard in the sternum. He cries out in pain, and I grin. The muscles in my cheek twitch just below my eye. I’ve never felt so strong. I have him. I’m standing over the Red Man with my stake hovering over his neck. I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. The sweat is dripping off my nose. I can see the drops bursting in little flowers on his shirt. His lips are cracked and the skin is lifting like fish scales. He’s whispering something. I can’t hear it. His eyes are wide and he’s lying on his back like a dog. I could stab him through the neck. The flesh is soft and the stake is heavy. Gravity would do half the job. I could leave him pinned to the ground, limbs flailing and gargling as he drowns in his own blood. I press down and I can see a circle of shadow in the depression where the stake digs into his flesh. All I have to do is push. It would be easy. I’m surprised how easy. As easy as throwing rocks off a bridge. Push him into eternity. The Red Man is waiting. I need to decide if I’m the sort of person who throws rocks at cars just because there’s no net.
Chapter 6 Truce I would like to kill him. It would give me the same kind of satisfaction as sinking my chompers into Paul Hiller’s arm in the canteen line, or shoving that loaf down Short-sleeves’ throat. I tell Scott the joke about the serial killer. ‘. . . So then the serial killer says, “You’re
scared? I have to walk back by myself !”’
When I smile, my lip splits. I lick it and taste a drop of blood. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I tell him, with my stake still in his neck. ‘But you can’t come after me any more. Get it? This is over. I’m leaving you here. I’m walking back by myself.’ He laughs at me. He is laughing hard and his red eyes are bulging. ‘What do you want from me? I confessed. I’m repentant. What else is there?’ He’s rolling on his back, his red face grins. ‘You can’t kill your history,’ he says to me. ‘You have to live with it.’ ‘What?’ ‘The things you do. You have to live with them, every day. For ever.’ I stare at him. ‘But I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about what happened to you. I didn’t know that it would turn out like that.’ He stops laughing. ‘Can’t we have a truce?’ I ask. He shakes his head. ‘You don’t get it. Everything you do you have to carry with you everywhere. It doesn’t go away, no matter how repentant you are. There’s no truce, Mackenzie.’
‘Ever?’ ‘Ever.’ Then I turn around. Using my stake like a walking stick, I head back into the bush. There’s a road. I found it before. I’ll find it again.
Chapter 7 Cactus Flower In the clearing, my tent slumps in creases and folds like an old woman’s face. The ludicrous metal tripod is tipped on its side. I can see a few scuffs in the leaf litter, but other than that there is no sign that anything has changed. I stand on the rock at the river’s edge and watch the water jostling against the stones. I slip my pyjama top over my head, step out of the bottoms and stand naked on the rock for the moment, letting the sun soak in. A willy wagtail scolds me from a low branch, and the river applauds. I slide into the icy water. The cold numbs my flesh, takes my breath away. The water tugs at my hair and steers my limbs downstream as I breaststroke against the current. When my muscles start to fatigue I hold my breath, turn belly-up and let my body drop to the bottom. I open my eyes and see tiny bubbles escape from my nostrils and race each other to the surface. The water spills off me as I climb onto the bank. I lie flat on a long, warm boulder. My fingers creep over the rock surface into tiny hollows the size of thimbles. The sun tingles like gentle teeth. A breeze touches my skin where elastic hems would normally be and I feel exposed and hardy at the same time, like a cactus flower. When I am dry I duck into the tent and dress in fresh clothes. I inspect the cuts on the bottom of my feet. The serrated edges are grey and swollen from the water. I’m surprised, once I pull on a pair of thick socks and my boots, how little they hurt. While the fire crackles and spits into life I take down the tent and roll it back into its olive-coloured bag. The camp counsellors will be here soon. I wonder whether they will just toot the horn or come along the track to collect me. I feed my pyjamas to the fire and peel back the lid from a can of baked beans. The translucent flames dance and weave through the fabric like lively sprites. The smoke drifts over me, heating my face, while my wet hair soaks the back of my T-shirt. I have never felt so clean.
I hear the eighteen-seater trundling along the road for a long time before I see it through the trees. I extinguish the fire with a billycan of river water and then I carry my bags along the path to the side of the road.
Chapter 8 20 543 838 people The counsellors took me straight to the sick bay. Bethany lay on a cot with her face slack and dopey. She smiled when she saw me. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘My coping strategies got away from me,’ she murmured. I sat down on the side of her bed. ‘The drugs they give me make me shuffle when I walk. You know.’ She frowned. ‘Do you know?’ ‘I know,’ I told her. Bethany took a sip of water. I helped her put her glass back on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to get you a whistle and a light for attracting attention. You can wear it around your neck for whenever those coping strategies get out of control.’ She smiled again. ‘Toot, toot,’ she said to me. Callum was sitting in the courtyard outside. I could hear guitars and drums in the mess hall – people practising for the jam session after dinner. Most of the others had gone kayaking for the afternoon. A few stretched out on the lawn reading, plucking at the grass and talking. ‘How was finger-painting?’ I asked, dropping my bag. He shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘I’m definitely cured. You?’ I smiled. The skin on my face felt tight. ‘Actually, it was better than I expected. I was all ready to slay the demon, but I changed my mind.’ ‘It’s still out there?’ He mocked a gasp.
‘Yes, I suppose he is.’ I scuffed my feet along the bricks. He patted the seat next to him. ‘Who’s your demon?’ I did my breathing, waiting for the anxiety to subside. Callum watched me. After a few moments my heartbeat slowed to normal and I began. ‘When I was little I would spend time after school in my Dad’s laboratory, which was in a warehouse on Farley Road, a few streets away from home. There were always customers waiting for their baggies of pills and powders. They looked sick and impatient and mildly embarrassed, as if they were people at a normal chemist’s shop.’ I pulled a leaf off the eucalypt. ‘My father made amphetamines. He’s in jail. I have spent my whole life surrounded by junkies and drug dealers.’ ‘We all . . .’ he started. ‘Please,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t stop me now, because I’ve never told anyone this before. This is a bit of a moment.’ Callum nodded for me to continue. ‘Scott, my brother, worked there. When the police raided, he ate all the drugs. He was hiding the evidence. He panicked, and instead of running, he tried to protect my dad. My dad should have tried to save him. He didn’t even try. I thought Scott was my monster, but . . .’ I rolled the leaf over in my fingers. ‘In a secret place I’m glad my dad went to jail, because if he hadn’t I would have tried his pills the way some kids steal smokes from their parents. By now I would be taking them all the time and I would be exactly like Itsy, like my mum. I’m proud that I don’t take drugs. That’s one thing I can feel good about, because I could have been a junkie too. It would have been easy. It would have been easier. You don’t have to deal with anything.’ I took another breath and plunged on. ‘So he’s the real demon. My dad. And I don’t know how much of the bad stuff I’ve done is because of how I’ve grown up, or because being morally corrupt is in my blood. How can you tell? Does it even matter?’ Callum looked me in the eye, but he didn’t speak. ‘I can be different from them both. That’s what I decided out there.’ ‘We all have parents in jail,’ he said. ‘Everyone here has.’
I nodded, because I knew. That was the asterisk. The camp counsellors asked us to write about someone who has ‘disappointed’ us. I knew when I heard the passages written by the others that ‘disappointment’ is an outrageous understatement for the way we feel about our incarcerated parents. My father stole my mother from me in dolly steps. In his absence she wasted away a minute at a time. The other dealers scuttled all over her like spiders, and she melted away. I don’t know if Katie Winter was instructed to invite me to her house by her father, or whether she truly wanted to be my friend, and then I just blurted out what my father did, in front of a police officer. Eight-year-olds shouldn’t have to keep secrets, shouldn’t be made to tell lies. Either way, while I have to live with what happened to Scott and how my family collapsed, I’m choosing to stop feeling guilty about it. ‘I’ve showed you mine, now you show me yours,’ I grinned. Callum lifted up his shirt on the right-hand side. The whole right side of his torso was a chaos of thick scars. The criss-cross marks on his forearms made sense now. Defensive wounds. ‘The shark got you after all?’ I joked. I reached out to touch his ribcage. ‘Don’t!’ He jerked away, pulling his shirt down. ‘No, actually, one night my mum handed me a bowl of spaghetti, but I dropped it on the floor, and then she stabbed me twelve times with a paring knife. So now I have a bit of a thing about people . . . girls, women in general touching me, which is kind of, you know, because I’m still a guy, and hetero, and fully functional . . . You can imagine. Sorry, I’ll shut up now.’ He blushed. ‘Your mum is the shark.’ ‘My mum is the shark,’ he repeated. ‘The rock-thrower.’ ‘And your dad?’ ‘My dad lets her.’ I scrunched up the leaf and smelled it, letting the clean aroma fill my nostrils. I remembered him in the car and the woman touching his shoulder. When he got out of the car he’d had a slight sheen of sweat over his face. He had looked through me because he was doing his own form of breathing.
‘So you’re excused from trust.’ ‘Yep.’ He stared at his shoes. ‘You should do it. The Solo, I mean.’ Callum rocked back as though I’d struck him. ‘No! I can’t. I’m not ready. You saw what happened to Bethany. I’m not good at being alone. Or being with people.’ He smiled briefly, but it looked more like a grimace. ‘You won’t be alone, you’ll have your demons. You can even borrow mine, if you like.’ It was a quip – a pretty good one too. Callum laughed. ‘No. Maybe one day. Maybe they would let you come with me. You could protect me. Crazy warrior woman.’ He smiled at me. ‘I guess with you having your girl-touch thing and me with my unpredictable violent tendencies, it’s not going to work out for us, is it?’ I waited for the mortification to set in, but it was all right. Just a twinge. ‘I guess not.’ He stared across the lawn. ‘Unless you choose to stop being unpredictably violent and I decide to stop being thingy.’ ‘It’s not really as simple as that, is it?’ He shrugged. ‘No, but at least we’re talking about it.’ I nodded and we both watched a sparrow hopping around the garden. I’d been so nervous around Callum, but he was way more damaged than me. I wanted to put my arms around him. That’s never going to happen. I can be his friend – just his friend. No demands or expectations. It would seem I’ve found the motivation to create and sustain healthy relationships. My counsellor will be ecstatic. It’s a risk, but there are 20 543 838 people in this country who are not my mum and dad. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance.
The end.
