Smashed (14 page)

Danica stoops down and scoops a stone up off the footpath, hurling it into the water as we pass the marina. ‘It changes you — no going back. But it’s possible to … I dunno … move
past
it, I guess. I’m trying hard.’ Her voice catches a bit as she says this, and we walk the rest of the way to the rowing club in silence. I have no idea what she’s thinking, and don’t even try to guess. The whole sex thing is so complicated — and so different for girls, I guess — and I’m hardly the world expert. All I know is that I’ve got this terrible urge to reach out for her hand and hug her close, but I’m terrified I’ll scare her off.

As we approach the club, my heart starts pummelling, and I feel like I’m being squeezed by giant pincers around my chest. My legs, too, slam to a stop, and I’m stuck in fear-filled limbo — too scared to walk forwards and face whatever my memory will throw up at me, and petrified that if I don’t find out, Danica will see me for the useless wimp I really am.

I close my eyes and try to calm myself by focusing my thoughts onto my breath. But closing my eyes catapults me straight back to that night.

Now I’m turning the corner by the rowing club, pitching directly towards the darkest corner of the lot. There’s no one here but me and a shrieking voice of vengeance that builds into a rage inside me … and then
… and then … I see him … Don. He’s stooped over against a wall, and as I get up close to him he turns his head …

‘He was there,’ I gasp to Danica, pointing over to a low wall. ‘I saw him there.’

I edge reluctantly over to the wall, thrown back into the memory.
Blood pours from his nose, which looks all mashed, and there’s one hell of a big swelling just above his eye. He’s crying, blubbing in self-pity, and when he sees me standing there he howls, ‘I’m really sorry, Toby, man … I’m sorry … sorry …’

The anger’s building inside of me like a million swarming wasps, and his whining only makes it worse. ‘It’s too late to be sorry,’ I yell back at him, disgusted. I’m up real close, staring down at his pathetic ugly face, and Rita’s sobbing fills my brain. I can’t stop my whole body shaking and I have the urge to run away, but it’s like I’m plastered to the spot.

Don is trying to drag himself up now. There’s a cut on one of his ears, and his face is smeared with snot and blood. He manages to stand and he sways before me, holding out his hand like he thinks I’ll shake it. Then he’s blubbing again … ‘I didn’t mean to do it, dude. I drank too much and …’

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ I scream. The last thing I want is a
blow-by-blow account of what the raping bastard did to her. I fling my arms out at him, my sleeve mashing against his filthy, bleeding face as I grab onto his shoulders and hoick for all I’m worth into his sleazy face …

‘Toby! Toby!’ Someone’s shaking me and I look down to see Danica’s hand in mine. She’s peering, really worried, into my face. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I spat at him … he tried to shake my hand and so I spat at him.’

The pressure on my hand decreases and she lets it drop. ‘What else?’ She’s frightened of what I’m going to remember: I can read it in her eyes.

‘That’s it,’ I reassure her, relief flushing through my system in one warm wave. ‘I spat at him and walked away.’

I can recall it clearly now. The horror of his face close up. The overwhelming need to puke. The swill of booze inside my gut. I didn’t do another thing — that spit I fired straight between his eyes had said enough.

‘He just collapsed onto the ground and lay there blubbing he was sorry,’ I say. ‘You know, up close he stunk of alcohol — not beer, I think, but something else. He was probably quite written off.’ It’s quite a revelation this, though it shouldn’t have surprised me when I think of it.

‘That’s hardly news.’ Danica shrugs. ‘The doctors made a crack about it — reckoned it was touch and go
whether the assault would kill him or the level of pure alcohol in his blood.’

It’s when she says the word ‘blood’ that the significance of what I’ve just remembered hits me full on. ‘The blood!’ I shout. ‘On my sweatshirt … it came from his bleeding nose. I didn’t deck him at all. The blood was there all along!’

Suddenly I feel exhausted, like I’ve just gone through the whole ordeal from scratch. I teeter over to the wall and perch on it. Danica has gone really quiet, and it occurs to me I’ve just forced her to relive her brother’s terrible night too. ‘Are you alright?’

She nods, but ignores it when I pat the wall beside me to suggest she sit. ‘I gotta get back to Don.’ There’s a flatness in her voice now, a horrid kind of defeat.

‘I’ll walk you.’

She doesn’t even answer this, just starts to trudge back towards town. But I stay for just a moment with the dying embers of that awful night.
Who the hell had got to Don first? Someone who knew him? Or someone who had randomly picked on him because he was so drunk? And, if he still was reasonably okay when I left him, what happened next?

Neither of us speaks much as we head back to the hospital. My head is swirling with new images, new
questions, while Danica has retreated deep into her own dark thoughts.

When we reach the hospital I just keep walking with her, until she turns on me and blocks my way. ‘You gotta go now. It’s nearly two o’clock.’

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘I’m coming up. I have to see Don again … it helps to make this whole crazy thing real.’

Don’s still in intensive care, and Danica breezes over to his bed without another glance at me. I lurk over at the doorway, worried I’ll be sprung by the two night nurses, who greet Danica’s return with vague but friendly smiles. There’s nothing for it but for me to bowl on in too.

One of the nurses looks straight up. ‘What do you want?’

‘He’s with me,’ Danica replies, quick as a flash.

‘It’s far too late for visiting,’ the other nurse growls, but I send her my greasiest smile and shrug.

‘I’m only here for a moment,’ I assure her, and hurry over to Don’s bed, trying to keep my nervousness under control.

His head’s no longer bandaged quite as zombie-like, and it looks as though some of the swelling has died down. There’s a slick of sweat across his forehead, and he’s restless, his arms and legs twitching and his eyeballs rolling around beneath their lids. It’s a freaky thing to
watch — kind of like a blind guy who is trying to see.

Danica takes one of his hands and squeezes it, then leans over and croons into his ear, ‘It’s me, Donald. Dannie. I’m back.’

His head jerks, and I have to remind myself he’s in a coma and not hearing her. But suddenly one eye springs open and he’s staring up at Danica, and makes this crazy little grunt.

The poor girl jumps about a metre. ‘Nurse! Come here!’ They hurry over, but in the seconds that it takes his eye has closed. ‘His eye! He opened up his eye!’ Danica sounds so damn excited it stabs my heart.

I can’t stay. I leave them there, back out real slow, but no one even looks around.

‘He made a sound when I spoke — I swear he did!’ Danica’s happiness chases me along the corridor. I’m glad for her, I really am. I’m glad for me. It means he isn’t going to die. But after everything I’ve been through, and the freshness of tonight’s remembering, I don’t know how to feel. Maybe Don will make a full recovery. Maybe he won’t. Maybe I’ll get off somehow, or maybe not. And maybe Carl will give up drugs … nah, that’s a joke. There’s just one thing that Danica has shown me that’s for sure — the only one who doesn’t have a choice in which way things will fall is Rita.
It never bloody goes away
… 

I
’m so caught up in the bombsite of my feelings about Rita and Don I don’t even see the person heading up the front steps as I barrel down.

‘Mr Young!’ I turn around, shocked to hear my name, as Sergeant DeVinnie growls, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

This is just perfect, this is. Of all the bloody people to bang into on the hospital stairs, it has to be my luck, my
stupid
luck, to get caught by the only cop in Wellington who’d recognise me on the spot. Murphy’s Law … whatever you most
don’t
want to happen always will, and whatever you really
do
want to happen
never
does. Whoever that dude Murphy was, his luck must’ve been as crap as mine.

‘I can explain …’ I start, but he holds up his bear-paw of a hand to silence me.

‘Don’t start. You kids think you can talk your way out of everything, eh?’ He grabs me by the elbow and starts to escort me down the stairs. 

I’ve no idea what being found here might mean but it can’t be good, that much is clear. ‘I know this looks bad, but if you’d just let me explain …’

A bitter snort explodes from him. ‘One warning, kid — that’s all you’ll get. If you break curfew or association orders again, I’ll chuck you in a remand cell and throw away the key. You comprehend?’ The fury in his eyes bores into me, and there’s nothing I can do but nod.

He marches me straight to his car and heads for my home. I try to calculate the odds of DeVinnie catching me like this, and reckon it must be hundreds of thousands to one. I mean, there must be at least a few hundred different cops on alternating shifts around the city at any given time, so what are the chances of one of them being at the hospital, instead of any other building in the city, at exactly the same time as me, and then that the cop is one who recognises me?

‘What were you doing at the hospital?’ I can’t resist the urge to ask.

‘I had to see a trouble-maker in A and E — thought I’d check how Mr Donaldson is doing while I was there …’ His focus slides from the road to my face — I guess to watch how I react.

‘Wow. Do you check on him every day?’

‘I saw him when he first came in,’ DeVinnie says, his
voice turned hard. ‘When you see someone struggling to stay alive, it gets you here.’ He taps his chest, roughly where his heart would be. ‘I’ve got a kid his age at home.’

To tell the truth, I’m quite impressed. It never occurred to me that cops like him would get emotionally involved. ‘He opened up one eye,’ I blurt. I know I’m just digging myself in deeper here, but I’m hoping it will cheer him up. ‘That must be good.’

‘You’d better hope like hell it is,’ he snaps, and it hits me like a brick that his sympathy for Don actually means bad news for me. I think back to the way he laid the trap to trip me into a confession, and I wonder if the whole time he was thinking how he’d feel if Don was his own son. I reckon he would wish me dead.

‘Have you got any daughters?’ I ask.

‘Two,’ he admits at last. ‘Ten and thirteen.’ But he doesn’t elaborate, just kicks down a gear to tackle the winding road that runs up beside the zoo, and plants his foot.

The next obvious question I want to ask is fighting with my better judgement to come out. I know this guy must hate me now — he’s made that pretty clear by the way he looks at me with such disdain — but I reckon if he thought about the issue, he might change his tune. The old kin-selection, offspring-protection gene … 

But he’s pulling the car up outside our house now, and swivelling in his seat until he faces me. ‘Listen hard,’ he lectures. ‘You’ve had your warning now — next time you’ll be slapped in jail.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I grovel. ‘I promise I won’t do it again.’ I try to make my voice sound as genuine and goodie-good as possible, but the question that’s been forming on the tip of my tongue threatens to choke me if I don’t allow it to spill out. Still, I climb from the car first, leaning back in to fire my parting shot. ‘What would
you
do, Sergeant DeVinnie, if one of your son’s friends raped your
thirteen-year
-old daughter? How would
you
feel?’

The question slaps him fair across the face, but I don’t wait around to watch the fallout. My point, I figure, is already made. And we both know that the answer he is bound to give me will be cop-speak. Instead, I run like hell towards the house. Behind me, the car revs away, and it’s clear how bloody furious DeVinnie is by the way he wheelies around each corner till he reaches the bottom of the hill.

As the rumble of the car dissolves into the night, I slip back through my bedroom window and climb into bed, although there’s no way now that I can sleep. It’s so incredibly frustrating … with each step I take towards filling in some memory gap or unanswered question, a
whole range of new questions pops up uninvited to fill the space. In science this is commonplace and actually part of the fun, but when this ongoing uncertainty is based around your real life it feels like shit.

The only thing that’s worth this turmoil is Danica. I lie awake, as the night grinds around into a dull grey dawn, and relive the reassuring pressure of her hand in mine. It sure felt good.

Sandra the lawyer is lying in wait when we arrive downtown for the status hearing, and she herds us off into a side room like a farm dog rounding up stray sheep.

‘What on earth were you trying to pull by breaching your bail conditions?’ she throws at me the minute we walk through the door.

‘You did what?’ shrieks Mum.

‘Only bumps into the prosecuting officer at the hospital in the middle of the night!’ Sumo Sandra’s lips are pursed into a disapproving pout. ‘You’re bloody lucky he’s decided to warn you and nothing more.’

‘You’ve talked to him?’

‘Yes, Mr Smarty-pants. And if you want to end up spending time in jail, then keep up the personal attacks
on him. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to oblige.’ She turns to Mum and laughs. ‘Honestly, Maeve, he’s just like you! Not content to break their rules, he leaves poor Gavin with a flea in his ear about how he’d react if this were happening in his own family.’

Mum, however, is
not
amused. ‘We trusted you, Toby. What the hell were you playing at? I hope you weren’t harassing Don.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, okay? But I only went to the hospital after I’d been down to the wharves to see if I could remember what had happened there …’

‘And?’ prompts Mum.

‘The blood on my sleeves came from Don’s nose.’ It’s as if all the accusations made against me are confirmed. Dad’s grabbing hold of Mum’s hand, while Mum drops down into a nearby chair. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking,’ I rush on. ‘It was already there — I just got it on my clothes.’ Even as I’m saying this, it’s obvious the three of them think I’m talking unadulterated crap.

Sandra studies me with disbelieving eyes and clears her throat. ‘Let’s get to the case in hand …’

‘Look,’ I yell, ‘you’re s’posed to be on my side. I’m telling you I didn’t do it, but you’re still acting like I did.’

‘Tobias, it’s not whether
I
believe you or not. The person we have to convince of your innocence is the
judge.’ She shuffles a wad of papers in front of her and motions with her head for Dad and me to take a seat. ‘As for today, what I’m trying to do is …’

She rabbits on, going over everything we talked about a few weeks ago: how the cops would present their evidence to the judge and I would have to make a plea. ‘If you change your plea to guilty now, he might decide to sentence you right away today.’

‘But I’m not going to change it,’ I defend. ‘
I DIDN’T DO IT!
’

‘
Fine
.’ She stands up again, running her hands over her skirt to smooth it down. ‘Then let’s go in.’

I can’t believe the evidence the police have scraped together to make their case. Someone saw me running, drunken, from the waterfront about that time. Okay, I guess that’s probably true. Another said he saw me acting ‘aggressively’ at Burger King. This one really surprises me, but then I think back and wonder if it was that fascist fat guy getting at me for revenge. There’s a lot of other incidental stuff about time and place, but the guts of their evidence seems to be the way my words got twisted when I talked to that nice woman cop.
Nice, my arse
. I recognise now that she was leading me, and I was just too dumb to see.

It’s only when the police declare I had a ‘clear and
direct motive’ that I realise what a bind I’m in. Although Rita has insisted no one blab her personal crisis to the world, and refused to make a statement when the crunch time came, the cops can use what Mum and Dad and I have told them as evidence, even though Rita says not to. I think about what this will do to her — having all her hurt and pain exposed — and feel like a traitor. She’s the last person I want to hurt.

The cops have this way of making everything they say sound reasonable and wholly true. So when it comes time for me to make my plea, I can almost hear everyone’s thought processes shouting ‘
Guilty
’ before I have the chance to speak. The only thing that’s changed for me, between this court appearance and the last, is that I finally feel sure that when I say ‘Not guilty’ I’m absolutely speaking the truth.

In the end, the judge announces that he thinks the police have enough evidence to proceed to a defended hearing, and he sets a date for six weeks’ time.

Then we’re out the doors and on the street. Sandra stands off to one side with Mum, while Dad puts an arm around my shoulders in moral support. ‘You okay?’

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. I know if I go straight home with Mum and Dad they’ll blast me into smithereens about last night — not that I have the faintest
clue what ‘smithereens’ would look like, but I’m figuring they’re small and painful, and definitely not cool. Besides, I have the urge to run — I feel like I’ve been cooped up in a cage all morning.

Mum and Dad aren’t too pleased when I say I’m not leaving with them, but I take off before Mum’s disapproving frown can get at me and break my will. I dodge through the traffic, over to the waterfront, and sprint along beside the oil-slicked sea until my lungs scream out with pain. It’s like I
need
the pain to wake me up, to free me from the caged-up feeling in my head. By the time I reach Te Papa I’m totally stuffed. I collapse onto a bench seat and spread myself right along it, closing my eyes to focus on my slowing breath. Above this I can hear the greedy squawking of the seagulls, the rattle and clang of the port and a whirlwind of excited chatter as a bus-load of school kids charges for the museum.

I can’t believe I have to spend another six weeks waiting for the axe to fall. The upside though is that it gives me more time to somehow prove it wasn’t me. And I’m starting to get a stronger and stronger feeling that the key may lie in finding Carl, and that I should make this my priority — wag my Stats lecture this afternoon and seek him out. But, even as I decide this, I realise it’s Danica I really want to see. She’s the first girl I’ve ever met who
doesn’t look at me as if I’m some kind of midget freak and, even though my life is falling right apart, I just can’t clear her from my mind.

Before I try to analyse what I’m about to do, I catch a bus to the railway station and board a train for Lower Hutt. The city stretches out behind me, sun bouncing off the windows of the multi-storey office blocks in a frenzy of unreadable Morse code. I can’t take my eyes off the flashing signals, and their intensity stirs me up in a way I really can’t describe. One minute I’m filled with a sense of total caveman joy at the thought of seeing Danica again, and the next the flashing signals are mocking me —
Stop. Go. Stop … No, go … no, stop
… It’s like they’re teasing me to get real, to realise that the only reason Danica has humoured me is she’s desperate to find the person who thumped Don.

Suddenly I’m swept by this terrible urge to pull on the emergency cord and leap off onto the tracks like some train robber — anything to escape the total fool I’m about to make of myself. But then I realise I’ll look even more of an idiot if I stop the train just cos I’m too scared to face a sixteen-year-old girl, and the urge is miraculously quashed.

By the time I walk from Melling Station to Hutt Valley High, the lunch-hour is almost over. Kids sprawl around
the grass in the warm midday sun, and it’s clear now there are far too many pupils here for me to hope to spot Danica in the crowd. Quite why I didn’t figure this out before isn’t too clear. Maybe when I think of her my brain reverts to caveman smarts. That horny old reptile brain, beneath the new, more modern one, rules again.

So I’m standing here, lurking like a junior paedophile, when a group of girls about Danica’s age wander past. This is my chance.

‘Hey,’ I yell. ‘Excuse me, but do you know where I’d find Danica Donaldson?’

They must think I’m the most pathetic thing they’ve ever seen, cos they don’t even bother answering me — just start giggling uncontrollably and wander off. So, instead of humiliating myself further, I divert to the dairy down the street and buy a trusty mince pie and a Coke. I’m just gonna have to forget this stupid yearning after someone who’s clearly not the least bit interested in a geeky Asian crim. Why is it that the only girls I fancy couldn’t give one toss for me?