Losing It (10 page)

Dear Issy,

Do you know what I think?

I think you’ve had a lucky escape. That Mike Maxwell character sounds like a total moron with the personality of a school desk and the manners to match. Certainly not in the least deserving of you. I hope you got some good photos for the paper.

Take care.

Luv,

Jo

P.S. Tell me more about Tim.

Dear Jo,

Cute smile. Interesting ears. He gave me a bite of his Jellytip ice cream at a newspaper meeting yesterday.

Luv,

Issy

Dear Issy,

A bite of his Jellytip??!! Wow! Sounds serious!

Luv,

Jo

D,

I got a letter from Issy today. She’s gone all gooey over some guy from the newspaper.

P.S. It’s happened. I am turning into Hairy Maclary. And it’s not only my legs! This morning I discovered I am growing facial hair! Dot said that’s what happens when your body weight gets low. (She also said you lose your sex hormones. I said I didn’t know I had any.)

Message from Occupational Therapist

Please bring along magazines, fabric scraps etc. on Wednesday. We are doing collage.

Dear Jo,

It’s me. Dad. The hospital phoned yesterday to say you had lost more weight. I am so worried. The doctor has organised a meeting at the hospital and it would be great if we could get together. Please telephone and let me know.

Luv,

Dad

Dear Mum,

Do you remember that time when our fridge broke down – only it wasn’t actually the fridge, just a blown fuse? But we ended up getting a new one anyway.

What a laugh that was, eh.

Issy,

Have you ever had a row with your Mum and told her you hated her?

Jo,

Hell no. She’d kill me if I told her that.

Issy,

Kill you?!

D,

Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you. Yeah, right!

But some words are even sharper than swords.

Issy and I had been going to Brownies since we were seven. And now we were both ‘Sixers’, which meant that we each had a group of younger girls to look after. Usually Issy’s mum took us to Brownies and back on a Monday night. It was easier that way because she did a lot of helping out and besides, Mum had Matt to look after.

It was going to be our second ever camp and we were really excited. The camp was at some place near the beach and you got to stay for three nights in bunkrooms. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Three of the mothers, including Issy’s, stayed on to cook and help out. We did all sorts of things at camp. Like, we went for walks and made cards with dried flowers and we toasted marshmallows at night and played housie and charades and stuff.
Nine-year
-old stuff. At the end of the camp Issy and I had six new badges. We were stoked! Issy’s mum was great. She knew how to get people organised, that’s for sure. Issy said it was a pain having her mum there but I think she really quite liked it. The other girls thought she was cool too.

They needed two volunteers to come and
help clean up on Monday before we went home. That’s what Mum was going to do. She arrived after breakfast. The camp helpers were all having a laugh in the kitchen and I could see Mum from the window. She’d parked the car miles down the road like she always did, even at the supermarket, because she was such a nervous driver. As soon as I saw her I got a sinking feeling. She always looked worse when I hadn’t seen her for a while – with those slumped shoulders and flat hair. Her pants were all baggy and I watched her trudge up the driveway dragging her feet like blocks of concrete. Matt raced on ahead, happy as Larry. He must have been about four then.

I saw Mum arrive but I didn’t rush up to meet her. Instead, I stood back and waited for her to come to me. She gave me this weak smile and a quick hug before Brown Owl shoved a broom in her hand. She looked relieved to have something to do. Poor Mum – she was never good at small talk.

A while later we were all sitting round together getting our new badges and stuff. We’d made ‘thank you’ cards for the helpers and we were practising a new song. Everyone was having a good time until suddenly Brown Owl appeared at the door with my brother Matt. ‘This young man is in need of a mother,’ she said grimly. She looked so serious that everyone stopped talking and Mum dropped her broom and raced over. Matt looked upset, like he’d been crying.

I’ll never forget the look on Mum’s face. Or how everyone
stared while Brown Owl explained how Matt was found wandering down the road on his own, near the railway line. Brown Owl said everything was all right now – but you could tell what she was thinking. You could tell what everyone was thinking.

I can still see the look of horror on Mum’s face when she realised what’d happened. She’d obviously forgotten about Matt completely. Gone off into one of her trances. And he’d wandered off and could have been killed. Then Mum let out this groan and collapsed onto a chair.

‘No harm done then,’ said Brown Owl, trying to lighten things up a bit. I stayed in the circle trying to ignore everything but my face was getting hotter and hotter. I suppose I was embarrassed. (Or ashamed.) And Mum just sat there holding Matt and stroking his hair and looking about as miserable as I’d ever seen her – as if life was some puzzle she couldn’t quite work out. And then she started to cry and someone went and sat with her but it wasn’t me. All I wanted to do was crawl under a rock.

I can’t quite remember what happened next. We had lunch and then a farewell ceremony in the garden, I think. But I remember getting in the car and looking over at Mum with her bloodshot eyes, and I just felt so angry. I couldn’t help it. Why can’t you be like everyone else, I thought. Why do you always have to be like this? It’s not fair!

And then I said it.

‘I HATE YOU.’

I didn’t mean it. I really didn’t. I’d never said it before but I couldn’t help myself. ‘I WISH YOU WERE DEAD.’ It just slipped out. And I couldn’t take it back. And maybe I didn’t want to. But then I felt sick.

That day something inside me turned mean and hard. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing.

And it’s still there now, hard as rock. Like a closed fist in my gut. And nothing I do can ever make it go away.

Except, perhaps … throwing up.

D,

We did collage with the new OT today. We sat there with magazines and scissors cutting stuff out. It was supposed to be a kind of self-portrait. Veronica said to make an image of something that had meaning for us, which was quite a fun idea and it was interesting to see what the others came up with. Like, Kara spent such a long time getting everything cut straight that she didn’t get much glued on at all. (And then of course there was the inevitable hand washing routine to follow.)

Leon’s portrait was very musical, with a border of black and white stripes that looked like the keyboard on a piano and lots of semi-quaver shapes in the middle. Ingrid’s was lovely – very flowery and sweet. Tegan managed to find a couple of horses to focus on, surprise, surprise, and I farted around for ages before putting mine
together. In the end I did two. For the first one I cut out two tennis racquets from an old Rebel Sports catalogue – I stuck them in the middle of the paper and made a background out of all sorts of other stuff. The racquets were supposed to
represent
Issy and me. Then I noticed a ball of black wool in the materials box and I had another idea. This time I got a new piece of paper and I made a pattern on the paper using the wool. I cut the wool into lengths and strung it across the page and before I knew it I’d made a spider’s web.

When we got home from the Brownie camp Mum and I kept out of each other’s way. We pretended like nothing had happened in the car. Like no one had said anything wrong at all. Sticks and stones may break my bones … and all that…

I remember Mum making a special effort with tea. We had roast chicken, which was Dad’s
favourite
. And hokey pokey ice cream for pudding, which was mine. Then I had a bath. But I felt bad. And that night in bed I lay there working out how to say sorry. There was no easy way. Sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean it. I … Look, about that … Maybe I’d wait until Dad went to work.

But by then it was too late. Because when I woke up that morning Mum was gone. She’d taken the car and gone. Vanished. Dad thought
she’d gone to the loo in the night and stayed up for a while because she couldn’t sleep. She did that sometimes. Sometimes she made tea and put the tele on at four in the morning. Except that this time she didn’t make it back to bed. And she’d taken a suitcase as well.

I don’t remember much about that day but I do remember Pop coming over and screaming at Dad, like it was all his fault. Dad was actually quite calm,
considering
. He kept saying that everything was going to be okay. Mum had taken the car and her wallet, which meant she also had her credit card. And if she was going to do anything stupid she’d hardly have taken her credit card, Dad said. It wasn’t until ages after that I realised what he meant by ‘anything stupid’. ‘Anything stupid’ meant ‘do yourself in’ or ‘jump off a cliff’. Anything stupid meant suicide. Because that’s what people like Mum did. Not that I knew that then.

She hadn’t left a note, which was a good thing, according to Dad. Maybe she just needed a break. Pop didn’t agree. Pop was going nuts. It was his idea to call the police.

I was so scared when the police arrived. I knew it was all my fault. I knew that Mum had left because of what I’d said to her and the police were bound to find out in the end. They’d only have to look at me to know… It’d be written all over my face. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear thinking about what I’d said and the look on Mum’s face when I’d said it. I might as well have stabbed her with a knife. Or driven her to the edge of the cliff myself.

So I laid low, spending most of the day hiding in my bedroom and making bargains with God. Weird how I’d never thought much about God before and now I was pleading like crazy with him. ‘Please God, I will keep my room tidy forever and ever if you just let Mum walk through the front door. Please God, I promise never to tease Matt ever again in my life if only … Please God, please, please make Mum come home so I can tell her I’m sorry.’ But God wasn’t listening because Mum didn’t come back. And not only that but they never found any sign of the car, either. Not that they didn’t try. Her photograph was everywhere – even on the TV.

I was worried about the ‘distressed state’ bit. Did that mean she was still wearing her pyjamas?

For a while nothing much changed. It was just like Mum was in hospital again. Dad went to work each day and Mrs Jordan came over to clean the bathroom and have a tidy up. And Aunty Kay helped out sometimes. But mostly, Dad tried to carry on like everything was normal. We all did.

Pop came around as well but he was always going on at Dad in his gruff old Scottish voice. ‘You should n’ya let things get so bad…’ Always growling. Always arguing. Always rowing. Then one day they had a humungous argument and the next thing Pop was moving away to be near Aunty Kay. Dad said Pop was old and set in his ways. A stubborn old codger who liked to blame everyone else. Dad also told me that Pop never went to visit Mum when she was in hospital. Not even once. Didn’t like that kind of thing, he said.

Our family is so not touchy feely. We usually keep our feelings to ourselves. Especially Dad. Except for that day when I came home from school and he was crying. I’d never seen Dad cry before and it was awful. He was too big to cry. Too old. And it looked all wrong – with his shoulders heaving up and down. I felt scared then. Really scared, because I knew, at that moment, how bad things were. I also knew that I could never tell Dad the truth about why Mum left. Never!

One day a police car pulled up and a man and a woman came inside our house. The woman wore a uniform. The man was in plain clothes. They asked loads of questions. Dad offered them a cup of tea and some of Mrs Jordan’s shortbread. He got out the good cups and saucers from the china cabinet. They are going to find out now, I thought. This time they are definitely going to find out. And in a way I wanted them to. Except that I didn’t have the guts to tell them myself.

Afterwards, the police wanted to talk with me alone. They asked weird questions, like had I ever heard Mum and Dad fighting. And did they argue a lot and had I ever seen Dad hit Mum. Of course not. (Dad never hits anyone, I said.)

They asked all the wrong questions and they left
without
finding out the truth.

School was the worst part, with everyone knowing. Jimmie Whaanga from Room 11 asked if we had thought of looking for Mum in the garden because last year
someone
went missing and they found her buried in the
backyard
under the blackcurrant bushes.

When Mum first left, Dad talked as though she’d be back any minute. ‘Keep that drawer tidy for when your mother gets back,’ he’d say. Or – ‘Maybe we could borrow Mrs Jordan’s caravan again when we’re all together again…’

I don’t know when he stopped saying stuff like that or when we stopped talking about Mum so much. I still tried to make deals with the man upstairs. Like, okay then, what
about if I give all my pocket money to the Salvation Army? Huh? But time went by and Mum still hadn’t returned.

And one day I realised that I hadn’t written about her in my stories at school for ages. And I’d stopped saying ‘Mum and Dad’ like they were one person and I hadn’t set her place at the table by mistake for a long time. Then I noticed her toothbrush gone, which was scary because I didn’t know if she’d taken it with her or if Dad had thrown it out. I couldn’t remember and I was too scared to ask.

Not thinking about it was the only way to cope.

It’s funny how your memory works. Like, sometimes I lose the picture of Mum in my mind. Sometimes I can’t remember the exact colour of her hair or the shape of her face. Or how tall she was. And then I panic. The only thing I remember vividly is the look on her face, in the car, after Brownie camp…

Life goes on. That’s what everyone says.

Dad started playing touch rugby, which is like normal rugby except that you’re not allowed to tackle. He played with the guys from work on Thursday nights. I liked Thursday nights because Mrs Jordan came over to put Matt and me to bed. I looked forward to it all day. She let us stay up late sometimes and taught us how to play cards.

She played Snap with Matt and always let him win. Then, after Matt went off to bed, we played Last Card.
She didn’t always let me win but sometimes I managed it. I love cards. Later on she taught me Poker and we played with matchsticks and sometimes ten-cent pieces.

I think Mrs Jordan felt sorry for Dad. She was always saying what a good job he did and how hard it must be. She thought he deserved a night out with the boys and looking after us was the least she could do.

One night there was a phone call and Mrs Jordan came racing over to mind us kids while Dad went off to the police station. They wouldn’t say what it was about but I knew it was serious because Mrs Jordan hugged him before he went and Mrs Jordan and Dad didn’t normally hug. (She’s not touchy feely either.)

But we had poached eggs and sausages for dinner and when Dad got back he was white as a ghost and needed a glass of Pop’s whiskey (kept in the top cupboard for special occasions).

The next day at school Jimmie Whaanga told the class for news that someone’s clothes had been found washed up on Castle’s Beach. He had the newspaper clipping to prove it.

Next day – 2:30a.m. and I can’t sleep.

How can anyone expect to sleep in hospital when it’s never dark or quiet? The night shift nurses seem to revel in making as much racket as they can, especially mean old Morag who has a very irritating humming habit, which sounds a hundred times worse at two in the morning. I guess you can’t blame her – it must be a pig of a job at times, tending to us loonies.

Some noises are better than others. Like Morag’s humming gets on my nerves whereas the rattle of the tea trolley is actually quite soothing. Funny that. The best noise of all is Leon, strumming his guitar in his room.
You have to listen hard but it’s worth it. Leon could strum me to sleep any day.

Charlotte’s web is spreading over the curtain rod now. Leon said the reason why spider webs don’t go mouldy is because they have a special anti-bacterial quality. No wonder he’s king of Trivial Pursuit. King of useless information more like.

Speaking of Leon – his mum AND dad came to visit yesterday. His mum doesn’t look anything like I expected. She has white blonde hair cut in a bob and was wearing a lacy red top under a black velvet jacket. Quite the stunner, I thought. His dad, on the other hand, is geeky looking with black-rimmed glasses. They don’t look like a couple at all and they don’t look very comfortable in the psych ward either.

Leon and I were playing cards in the lounge when they arrived but Leon had his back to the door so it was me who saw them first – kind of hanging together in the doorway like they didn’t know where to go.

When Leon heard his father’s voice he dropped the whole pack of cards on the floor.

His dad looked seriously embarrassed while his mum stared straight ahead as if she was preparing for
something
difficult. Like walking the plank perhaps.

‘Can we go somewhere, Leon?’

‘Sorry, Jo,’ says Leon, getting up. ‘Back soon.’

His parents followed him out the door without a word. That’s par for the course around here: no one introduces
anyone in this place. We keep our private lives separate and visitors must feel like intruders. I wonder if that’s how Issy felt when she came to visit.

So, Leon went off with his folks while I played Patience.

But he was back again in half an hour looking totally miserable.

When I asked how it went he didn’t answer, just grabbed the cards and started shuffling. I kept my mouth shut, figuring he was gonna crack sooner or later – which he did.

‘They’re back together,’ he said, finally. ‘He’s bloody moved back in.’

‘Your dad?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well? That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Because it’s not going to change
anything
, is it?! Like, it’s not going to change who I am and it’s not going to stop them blaming each other for it.’

I wanted to ask what for but I managed to hold my tongue. It was prickly territory and I felt sorry for him.

But I could never keep my big gob shut for long. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay, you know, Leon,’ I said. Then, for one horrible moment, I thought I’d got it wrong and maybe he wasn’t gay after all because he looked so totally shocked.