Creepy and Maud (3 page)

The other problem with this time-honoured, browbeating parental mantra is the whole concept of the ‘my way’ thing. For a start, there are bound to be, at the very least, two ways of doing everything in every household. Why else is Mum on the Ribena and Dad turning Dobie Squires into Cujo? Why else does Limo-Li kick his wife’s very expensive hairless cat across the room whenever he sees it? Not just when he sees it, actually. I’ve seen him seek the poor thing out just to put the boot in its bald arse. So every household has a
divided government to begin with. It’s the natural law, simply because by the time we kids are of an age to start thinking about our
own
way, our parents can’t stand the sight of each other.

So ‘their way’ is hardly a shining beacon of rationality. Even without knowing the details that pre-empted Lionel’s outburst, I’d place a safe bet that the ‘my way’ he was braying about has more to do with trying to control himself rather than Maud. Therefore, whenever I hear ‘You live in my house, you do things my way’ (and I’ve heard it a lot in my own house), my dickhead translator kicks in and I hear: ‘My whole life is miserably out of control, I’m switching to controlling yours.’

It’s that day, Slap Day, I decide to make contact with Maud. We’ve seen each other at school, of course, but I’m not the sort of guy she’d ever look twice at. Let alone speak to. Other kids think I’m creepy. Especially the girls. I don’t actually mind being thought of as creepy. My
Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM)
defines ‘creepy’ as: ‘having or causing a sensation of revulsion, horror, or fear, as of creatures crawling on the skin.’ This does not make one a target for bullying. On the contrary. It actually takes the target right off you. The jocks think I’m beneath them, the emos are afraid of me and the girls think I’m asexual.
Perfect. I just slip under the radar. Mostly.

I must take a second here, now that I’ve mentioned it, to talk about my
Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM).
I got it as a school prize at the end of Year 9. Closest I ever came to getting beaten up. You spend your entire school career building up a reputation as creepy and some idiot teacher gives you a dictionary as an ‘Endeavour Prize’. The only way I escaped with minor taunts and a bit of a shoving was the fact that they didn’t present me with a Bible. Anyway, I installed it straight away. Of course, I don’t benefit from the internet-linked part, but that doesn’t matter. I love it. Sometimes I’ll just sit researching words I haven’t thought that much about before. For example, I know that ‘idiot’ is the correct term for Mr Endeavour Prize, as it is a derivative of the Greek
idiotes,
meaning one who lacks professional knowledge. Yup. It was sitting in front of
Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM)
that I first started watching Maud.

Anyway, back to today, Slap Day. After Limo-Li leaves her room, Maud sits on the end of her bed and starts twisting and pulling her hair. She doesn’t cry at all. I feel like crying for her. I want to make contact, some kind of contact that doesn’t involve her freaking out and Lionel appearing at my front door again. So I write this
on a piece of paper in big black letters and stick it in my window so it faces out:

—Alice explained as well as she could that she had lost her way. ‘I don’t know what you mean by your way,’ said the Queen: ‘All the ways about here belong to me.’

I didn’t know she wore glasses. She’s never worn them at school. I step right away from the window so she won’t have to look directly at me and watch her inching closer and closer to her own window, scrunching up her eyes and pulling her mouth into a grimace. You know, the long-distance concentration sort of look. That’s when she puts on the glasses. Gosh, they make her look even prettier, if that’s possible. They are old-fashioned cat’s eye frames with shiny stones at the temples. The sort Elton John used to wear in the seventies. She is still tugging on her hair. Then she frowns. Then she smiles.

Not a big smile. A trembly kind of thing, really. But definitely a smile. I would have preferred a big cheesy followed by a response. But I am willing to take this as a sign of cautious solidarity. She doesn’t tell Limo-Lionel and she doesn’t rush away from the window. They were my biggest worries. She isn’t embarrassed, or angry, that the scene was witnessed. She just looks tired and hollowed out.

Have you ever noticed how most people don’t
ever show what they are really feeling? Like the embarrassed/angry thing. It’s like people come with a switch inside, or the switch is built at some stage. If they are embarrassed, they get angry. If they are hurt, they get angry. If they are confused, they get angry. Hang on. Maybe it’s not a switch. Maybe it’s a short-circuit straight to angry. I have no idea how people get if they are happy. I don’t know enough happy people to know how they act.

Anyway, there she is. Tired, hollowed-out Maud. With a smile like a shiver on a landscape. Still, it’s a smile. A smile that makes me brave. She backs away from the window then, sits on the end of her unmade bed, and resumes pulling her hair.

He scares me at first. But the scaring feels nice. Like the sting of a pull. Like the shiver of recognition. I have been seen.
All-the-ways-a-bout. Here-be-long-to-me.
He put that in his window for me, two fives that tumbled across the little space between us and read me and defined me in an instant. All the ways are all about—good is bad, love is disappointment, safety is dread. Here belongs the part of me who cautiously seeks the rest of the girl who caused all the ways to be all about. How does he know this about me? How does he know that those fives will click my hidden parts open? I like fives. I like fives that swell and drop like a cadence. There is a lovely finality to five syllables. It is like a deep breath, a rolling over in bed, a sit-down after a long stand-up.
Sometimes I will manipulate what I say, out loud and in my head, to try and make it into five. It comforts me.

I will not tell my dad this time. My mum and dad do not like Creepy and they do not like his parents. I hear them talking. They do not know I listen, or think that if I do listen, I do not understand. They think I am disabled. Unstable. Incapable. But I hear them. I hear Creepy’s mum and dad, too. I hear them fighting and the fighting is almost like love. At least Creepy’s mum and dad make some noise. My parents do not make noise anymore. It is like everything has gone brittle about them: the corners of their mouths, the little dip in their throats where you can track a swallow, even their fingerprints. Did I make them this way? Did I spread this frailty between them?

Creepy’s mum and dad must love each other because you only notice love when it is being replaced with loneliness, and there is nothing lonelier than giving all your loudness to one person. Once I heard them fighting with one another in their backyard and I got so excited I started to pull. When I looked out my window, I saw they were sitting opposite each other in plastic chairs, yelling and leaning forward at each other. And then I saw that Creepy’s dad was cutting the toenails on one of his wife’s feet while her other foot soaked in a tub of soapy water. Creepy’s mum was yelling ‘Shut up!’ but
kept leaning her head back a bit and closing her eyes to the sun. I wonder what Creepy thinks about this hostile tenderness.
Hos-tile-ten-der-ness.
That’s a nice five.

Everyone at school calls him Creepy. I even overheard the registrar, Mrs Jackson, calling him Creepy. There is something creepy about him. People avoid him and he does not seem to mind. He does not have any friends. He is always reading. I had not paid him any attention at all until he started looking at me through my bedroom window. When I did start to pay attention, I mostly noticed that he was unnoticeable. You would not even know he was in the room, or not in the room. Does that make sense? Even ghosts and secrets leave some sort of presence, but not him. He is like dust in the air. You know it is there but it does not affect you until the light hits it in a certain way. Even then, it is just a flimsy pall you can walk straight through. That is him: you could walk straight through him and he would not even leave a cold spot in your heart.

Sometimes I look at him when he is not looking.

I have never had a boyfriend. I have done some things with boys, but I have not done everything and have not ever wanted to do everything. I do not think about Creepy in that way, but I think about him differently to other boys. I think Creepy thinks about me in that way. But Mum says I misinterpret things and
do not pick up on social cues. I just think I get angry because people never see me. Apparently, there is a medication for that.

So sometimes I look at him, but only when he is not looking. He has a not-looking face. It is the face of someone who has quickly averted their eyes just before you turn to look at them.

I have friends. The sort of friends you have for the sake of convenience. The sort of friends who do not know you and know they do not know you and that is okay with them and you. They are the group you hang around with, that give you credibility. My friends ignore that I pull my hair and sometimes eat it because they never see me do it, and if it is unseen it does not exist. They pretend I do not pull and I pretend Saz is not a cutter, Bec is not a klepto, Meg is not a compulsive liar and Alexa is not a slut. Alexa also has chlamydia, but that is common knowledge now and seems to have given her a bit of an edge. I would like a real friend but I do not know how you get them. I asked Nancy if you could be friends with someone you do not talk to and she said no: communication is the bedrock of any relationship. Nancy is the lady doctor they make me see. They think there is something wrong with me, so they send me to her and then they do not talk about it. Sometimes I ask Nancy real questions, which, by definition, are always
off topic. She listens and then gives me an answer that invariably invites more questions. Except I am never invited to ask more questions. Nancy is like the hunt master: she will let the dog sniff off track for pleasure every now and then, but she is always focused on the fox at the end. So I go away from my session, promising to think about things we discussed, and think only about the things we did not. Like: if communication is the bedrock of any relationship, why are all the relationships I have that are based on communication bogus?

Creepy and I have communicated, in a way. That one little note is like a teaser to me. It is a little grab of something real, not quite there but more there in that moment than anything else. Like that sheen of dust in the air. Nancy would say it is not communication at all. Nancy would say it is the creepy boy next door trying to make a pass. Except she would not say ‘make a pass’. That is something Mum would say. Nancy would probably say ‘trying to manipulate you into becoming involved in inappropriate behaviour.’

I am being encouraged to build on my friendships, and I tell Nancy that my friends are being very supportive, because this is what she wants to hear. If she hears what she wants to hear, it is a measure of her success, which, in turn, is a measure of mine. But I do not tell my friends anything. What would I say that
would not break the rules? We do not tell each other the truth. We use each other for cover.

When Saz and I got caught cheating on an end-of-term test, she almost opened a vein. She did not mean to. She was terrified of the consequences, others said. I say, any excuse will do. Anyway, she took to herself in the toilets with a broken make-up mirror. Bec found her, stole twenty-five dollars out of her purse, and walked away. That is friendship. Saz was eventually rediscovered by a hysterical Year 8 girl, who fell over running for the nurse’s office and broke two front teeth. I just took the fail and the talking to and went home and had a drink. Maybe the only person who was really punished that day was that Year 8 girl.

I was punished for what I wrote in my diary once. I cannot remember what I had written but I remember being told it was ‘very disappointing’, and then I was slapped. Mum would not even speak to me. I felt bad for her because I had hurt her. My thoughts had hurt her. I had thought something and it had fallen out of my head and done damage. It never occurred to me that she should not have been snooping in my diary in the first place. Pun-ished-for-my-thoughts. What to do when you are not allowed to think? Think in code. Think in codas. Do not think.

Coda: If she hears what she wants to hear, it is a measure of her success, which, in turn, is a measure of mine.

I never know the right thing to say or think and sometimes I forget where I am and say things I should not. Or say things I would not if I took a minute to step outside my own head. I like it in here. In my head, I mean. It is other people who are worried about what is going on in there. I have decided not to come out of my head. If they want me, they can come in. I guess that is what Nancy is for.

My life is lived through a glass darkly. Creepy’s mum has a dark glass of red wine sitting on the toilet windowsill. I can see it from here. She keeps a cask in her laundry cupboard that either no one knows about or they choose to ignore. I have seen her get it out and
milk it, with darting eyes and a sweaty jaw. Poor lady. She gets the whole cat-pant thing going—I have seen Sylvia do it when Dad is about. Fight or flight. Creepy’s mum need not worry. She never gets caught. I never knew she took her wine into the loo until I saw the glass tucked behind the little curtain at the window there. The wine is the colour of blood. When the sunlight hits the glass, it creates a shimmer like a lady’s fascinator—like a Gorgon behind spider web. I live my life through a glass darkly, waiting for the light to fascinate me.