Solo (9 page)
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.
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.
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.
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!
And she’s got a little tin cup with her heart in it
To bang along the bars of her rib cage
‘
F
IERCE
F
LAWLESS’
A
NI DI
F
RANCO
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.
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.
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.
