Divine Madness (16 page)

‘Good stuff,’ Elliot smiled. ‘That’s what I like to hear.’

*

They headed to an arts and leisure complex on the Brisbane river known as South Bank. The area had galleries, a market, restaurants, parks, playgrounds and a manmade beach. The kids piled out of the minibus and Elliot began handing out plastic tubs with coin slots in the top.

‘OK,’ he yelled. ‘Good luck. There’s a lot of people around, so get out there and start earning. Let’s see if the twelve of you can raise a thousand dollars this afternoon. I’ll be picking up from here at quarter to six. Do
 
not
 
be late. I’m on an exceptionally tight schedule today.’

James strolled over to say hello to Lauren, Eve and a couple of the other girls.

James looked at Eve. ‘I was expecting to see you this morning.’

‘I’m glad you became an angel,’ Eve said flatly.

James spoke to a couple of other girls, but they all seemed reluctant to answer. Eve organised the twelve kids into four teams of three and sent them off to cover different areas of the South Bank complex. Lauren got the nod when she asked to fundraise with James and Paul.

‘So what’s the cause?’ one of Lauren’s pals asked.

Eve smiled. ‘Cancer research. That’s a good money-maker and we haven’t used it for a while.’

Paul headed off with Lauren and James in tow. Whenever James passed someone, he’d smile and shake his coin box. ‘Australian Cancer Research.’

About every third person found some coins to stick in the box.

‘I thought we were raising money to build the Ark,’ Lauren said, when nobody was nearby.

‘We are,’ Paul said. ‘But there’s a lot of prejudice against the Survivors. If we say it’s for the Ark, we don’t make a cent and get a load of abuse to boot.’

Lauren’s mouth dropped open, ‘But that’s
 
lying
 
…’

Paul shook his head confidently. ‘You can lie to devils, Lauren, they don’t really count.’

They ended up in a park a kilometre from where the van had dropped them off. Paul stood by a gate and told James and Lauren to head for the other entrance.

James shook his box at a passing family. ‘Australian Cancer Research,’ he grinned.

The man handed a bunch of dollar coins to his toddler son, who reached up and put them in the box.

‘Thank you,’ James said enthusiastically.

Lauren shuddered and looked back over her shoulder to make sure Paul was out of earshot. ‘This is so nasty,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the lowest thing ever by about a
 
million
 
per cent.’

‘Australian Cancer Research,’ James said to a passing pensioner, who ignored him. He turned and looked at Lauren. ‘I know, sis. Just grit your teeth and remember that it’s for the mission.’

‘And this cult is totally sexist: girls get all the domestic stuff. If you think four hours filling up boxes is bad, you should see what I’ve got. I spent this morning polishing floors. Tomorrow I’ve got four hours in the laundry.’

James shrugged. ‘What can I say, Lauren? We knew this mission was going to be tough. At least we know the evenings are a bit mellower and there’s school Monday to Friday.’

‘I know,’ Lauren said, shaking her head slowly. ‘I’m just having a little rant to get it out of my system.’ She rattled her tin at a passer-by, ‘Australian Cancer Research,’ and got a few cents for her trouble.

James grinned, trying to cheer Lauren up. ‘When I’ve got a few more dollars, I’m gonna crack this baby open and buy an ice-cream. You want one?’

Following an afternoon walking around fundraising and an enjoyable evening playing soccer with the lads, James was exhausted. When the late service ended at quarter past nine he walked up the escalators to the second floor and found a couple of pillows and some frayed sheets to cover his mattress. Twenty-six boys lived in the room, their ages evenly spread between eight and eighteen.

As the tired lads stripped off and crashed on to their mattresses, two of the oldest – Sam and Ed – switched on a large but decrepit TV and put on a DVD. James was expecting worthy Christian entertainment and was pleasantly surprised when the title music of
 
The Exorcist
 
came on. He’d seen the movie during a horror marathon at the CHERUB summer hostel and realised why it was being shown as soon as he remembered the plot: what better way to influence the minds of young Survivors than by sending them off to sleep on a movie about a girl possessed by the devil?

James’ mattress was next to Paul’s, almost touching. Twenty minutes into the movie a younger boy crept into the space between them and Paul slid an arm around his back.

‘This is my brother, Rick,’ Paul explained in a whisper.

James gave the youngster a smile. Within a few minutes Rick’s eyes were sagging and he’d started drifting off to sleep. Paul gently flicked his ear to wake him up.

‘Keep your eyes open,’ Paul said firmly. ‘Do you want to get the test?’

James didn’t ask, but he could tell from the look on Rick’s face that the test was something worth being woken up to avoid.

By the end of the movie, even the older boys were struggling to stay awake. When the closing titles began scrolling, Sam and Ed flicked on the lights. They were the biggest dudes in the room and they looked full of themselves as they glanced around at the kids lying on the mattresses. Staying awake had been too much for a couple of the younger boys.

‘I think we’ll take Martin,’ Sam said.

The pair closed on a scrawny nine-year-old a few mattresses along from James. He was curled up on his pillow, wearing nothing but red underpants.

‘Test time,’ the lads shouted as they shook him awake.

Martin woke with a start and scrambled up his bed, away from grabbing hands. ‘
Noooooo
, please.’

‘Why did you fall asleep?’ Ed asked, as he dragged the unfortunate kid off his bed. ‘You know you have to watch the movie.’

Sam smiled wickedly. ‘Now you’ve got to go out on your own and face the Devil.’

‘Are you really an angel? Only an angel can survive the night out there alone.’

‘If the Devil sniffs weakness he’ll get you, you’ll spend the whole night in agony.’

‘Don’t make me,’ Martin bawled desperately.

Sam slid open a glass door, while his partner dragged the gangly youngster across the floor and shoved him outside on to the roof terrace. Martin screamed as he clambered to his feet and banged on the glass door, begging to get back inside.

‘Sleep tight,’ the lads said in unison as they laughed.

As Martin gave up banging on the glass and slumped into the gravel with his bare back pressed against the glass, Sam noticed a glistening streak across the floor.

‘Oh man,’ Sam giggled, before kicking the glass behind his sobbing victim. ‘You pissed your pants, you dirty boy.’

Ed grabbed the pillow off Martin’s bed and used it as a foot rag. ‘Don’t worry, mate, we’ve found something to wipe up with.’

Most of the older lads in the room were smiling, but the little guys looked scared. Sam and Ed were nothing special and James reckoned he could easily have battered them, but getting in a fight now might ruin his chances of being accepted into the Survivor boarding school.

James felt bad as he looked at Rick’s tense fingers digging into Paul’s shoulder. The Survivors closely controlled everyone’s lives and James didn’t see how this bullying ritual could have become established without people in high places turning a blind eye.

Once the lights went out, Rick scrambled back to his own mattress. James pulled his duvet over his head and tried to block out the muffled sobs of the petrified boy sitting out on the balcony.

*

Martin was allowed inside at sun-up. His skin was puckered from a night curled up on gravel, but the Devil seemed to have left him alone.

James’ Sunday started with five brisk laps around the mall parking lot and a cool shower. Breakfast was honey puff cereal and orange juice, which set up a little sugar rush for the twenty minutes of chanting and singing that followed. At the end of this carefully designed emotional tune-up, James found that he’d shaken off his tiredness and was feeling alert and fairly happy.

But he didn’t need any of Miriam’s thought-control techniques to douse his spirits. The prospect of another four-hour shift as a picker was enough. He smiled at Paul as they crossed the road between the mall and the warehouse.

‘Each book is a brick for the Ark.’

Paul smiled half heartedly. ‘Elliot would be proud of you.’

As soon as they entered the warehouse, the foreman looked at James. ‘Are you Prince?’

James nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘I just got a call. You’re due over at administration for an induction test.’

James smiled at Paul, well pleased to get out of the warehouse. He headed back to the mall and an open-plan office inside a shop unit on the ground floor. There were a dozen paper-strewn desks, but nobody was working at them.

James spent a couple of seconds thinking he’d come to the wrong place, until a head bobbed up behind one of the cloth-covered partitions. It was Judith, a fit-looking woman in her early twenties who worked as Elliot’s assistant. As he walked to the back of the room James passed by Lauren and Dana, who both sat at desks scribbling away on a photocopied question paper.

‘I didn’t realise there were three of you,’ Judith explained, as she handed James a paper:
 
Survivor Aptitude Test – Ages 13–15
. ‘I should have called you at breakfast. You’ve got two hours, starting as soon as you sit down.’

Judith pointed him to a desk near the front of the room, a good ten metres from Lauren and Dana. The space was already set up with a couple of sharpened pencils and an eraser. James sat in an office chair and flicked through the pages. It looked like a reassuringly straightforward mixture of maths, spelling, a short creative story and an IQ test.

James Prince was supposed to be withdrawn and decently behaved, but James Adams hadn’t found any time for homework during his hectic weekend and got ratty when his Geography teacher demanded it on Monday morning. He earned a thirty-minute detention for his trouble.

After detention he headed to the deserted bike shed and rode to the North Park care home at breakneck speed, nearly getting on the wrong end of a Mazda when he charged an amber light.

Slightly shaken, James moodily wheeled his bike through the care home’s reception, exchanging nods with the cute-looking nurse at the counter, before pushing the bike into a storage cupboard. He was surprised to see two bikes beside Eve’s. He changed his sweaty school top for a fresh T-shirt and hurried back to reception.

‘Have you seen Eve, or noticed where Elliot left my trolley?’ he asked.

The nurse pointed down a corridor into the section of the home where the residents Eve visited lived. ‘I didn’t think you were coming when I saw the other two lads.’

‘What other two?’ James asked.

The receptionist shrugged. ‘I don’t know who they are, but they’re all down there.’

James jogged along a hundred metres of corridor, passing by his trolley on the way. He could have just grabbed it and got on with visiting his residents, but he wanted to ask Eve why she’d been blanking him all weekend and find out who the others were.

Part of the answer came when Paul stepped out of a room. Eve followed him with her trolley and last came Terry – the boy in James’ class whom he’d seen sitting reluctantly in the corner of the Survivor gymnasium a couple of times.

‘Ah, you made it,’ Eve said brightly. ‘You know Terry, don’t you? He’s volunteered to help out with our charitable work.’

‘Cool,’ James said. ‘So what’s the score with these two being here?’

Eve smiled. ‘I’m introducing Paul to my patients. He’ll be taking over my job here from tomorrow. Terry and I will be going off to start doing rounds at another care facility. The Survivors have never worked there before and we’re all
 
terrifically
 
excited about the opportunity.’

‘Oh,’ James said, unable to cover his disappointment.

‘Is there a problem?’ Eve asked.

‘S’pose not,’ he shrugged.

Eve smiled sweetly at Paul and Terry. ‘You boys have seen me go through the patter a few times. Why don’t the two of you take the trolley into the next room, while I have a word with James?’

Paul nodded, as Terry turned around and knocked on a door.

Eve’s expression stiffened as Paul and Terry stepped into the adjacent room. ‘What’s the matter, James?’

James rested his palm against the wall and shrugged. ‘I dunno, I just expected you to be there when I arrived on Saturday. Then when you spoke to me in the afternoon you made me feel like I was the shit on your shoe. Now you’re not gonna be coming here any more. What did I do that’s made you mad?’

‘You haven’t made me mad,’ Eve smiled. ‘I wanted to help make you an angel, James. Now Terry has been through some difficult one-to-one counselling sessions and I’m trying to help
him
.’