The Dark Part of Me (23 page)

‘Let me get that awful thing off you,’ said Mum, grabbing my wrist. She tried to pull the band over my hand but it was too tight. She bent over and bit the plastic between her teeth
but still it wouldn’t give. Dad shuffled forwards.

‘Give it here.’ He whipped a Swiss army knife from his trouser pocket, flicked out the blade and slit the bracelet from my wrist. It rolled down my chest and I picked it up, trying
hard to twig what ‘
Oblivion
’ meant, but my head was light and swimmy.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘You’re lucky you’re not brain damaged!’ Mum wailed.

‘For Christ’s sake, Janice, calm down.’ Dad patted my hand.

Mum huffed. ‘Don’t you pretend like you’re a part of this family.’

‘For god’s sake, just tell me what happened!’ I looked from Dad to Mum and back to Dad.

Mum got up and paced around the bed. ‘What the hell were you doing, Rosemary? Taking ecstasy tablets! You used to be such a clever girl. What’s got into you?’ She shook the
bracelet at me, then flung it in the bin. A bubble burst in my brain.

Pop! The taste of something hard and bitter cushioned on a satiny tongue.

‘Shut up, Janice,’ Dad said. ‘We’re in a bloody hospital.’

Yeah, I was in hospital but why or how I had no clue. The sun shifted and I could see other beds around me. Next to me, there was a woman, about twenty-five, with one of her legs in traction.
Opposite, there was a man with his whole head wrapped in bandages.

‘You collapsed at a nightclub in the Valley,’ said Dad, matter-of-factly.

Pop! Suck me, Rosie. Suck me. A nipple-ring hard between my teeth. Soft licking with tongue.

I turned to Dad, ‘What day is it?’

‘Two days before Christmas,’ said Dad. ‘You’ve been in and out of unconsciousness for a day or so now.’

‘You could have died,’ cried Mum.

My head whirred. I looked up and there at the foot of my bed was a young doctor with a pink carnation stuck in the breast pocket of his shiny, pin-striped suit. With a deep frown, he inspected
my chart, then proceeded, with sharp, efficient steps, up the bed and perched on the side.

‘You’ve had a close shave, Rosemary.’ He was peering into my eyes with a bright light. He had oily hair and his breath reeked of black coffee and fags. ‘You’ve
suffered a minor respiratory arrest and severe dehydration. When you came in, you weren’t even breathing.’ He slipped the cold disc of a stethoscope down the neck of my nightie.
‘We’ve been monitoring your heart and other major organs for damage and,’ he paused to listen to my ticker, ‘it all seems to be OK. You’ve been lucky.’ He
withdrew the stethoscope and smiled at me like I was three years old. ‘Now, would you like to go home for Christmas?’

Christmas. Christmas with Mum and Randy. I was busting out of my pants.

‘Yes, Doctor. It would be lovely to have her home for Christmas,’ Mum chirped, and fluttered her eyelashes just because he was a doctor.

He took a fancy gold pen from his suit pocket, scribbled something on my chart and hooked it back on the end of the bed.

‘One of our psychiatric consultants will be around in the morning to have a little chat with you,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry. She’ll be alright, Doc,’ said Dad, patting me on the head. ‘She’s a tough old boot.’

As soon as the doctor was gone, Mum was at Dad’s throat. ‘You’re such an embarrassment.’

‘What?’ said Dad.

‘Since when do you talk to a doctor like that? Calling your daughter a tough old boot.’

‘It was a joke.’

‘The only joke was marrying you.’

They were giving me a headache so I found the remote attached to a retractable cord and turned up the volume on Days, which was just finishing. That shut them up. Dad got up and stood at the
windows, hands deep in his pockets, looking down at the heavy, silent traffic lumbering along some major arterial.

Mum sat on the bed. She glanced around the room and whispered, ‘Hollie’s brother attacked a young man at the Arena nightclub, the same night you were there. The police have been up
here already, asking all sorts of questions. They want to know if you were involved, Rosemary. If there’s anything you know, you better tell me, now.’

Pop! Danny’s spear floated through the air in a slow, graceful arc.

In a flash, I was wide awake. Scott. Danny had speared Scott. That’s why he’d been stalking him all along. Dad pivoted from the window.

‘It’s been all over the papers. I didn’t realize it was the Bailey boy. Thought he’d been locked up years ago. Didn’t he bump off some kid?’

‘Rosemary, please try hard to remember,’ Mum insisted. ‘The last thing I want is you getting in some kind of trouble.’

‘Mum, I can’t remember anything.’

‘They reckon he was dressed up like some kind of abo,’ Dad added. ‘He stabbed the guy with a spear. Then he just disappears. The cops are everywhere trying to find
him.’

‘Did they say who he was? The guy Danny attacked?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

‘No, not yet,’ said Dad.

‘Is he alright?’ I asked, praying like fuck Danny hadn’t killed Scott.

‘Yes,’ Mum jumped in. ‘They said on the news he was in a stable condition.’

I sat up in bed, busting to know if it really was Scott. I needed to call the Greenwoods and then Hollie to find out more about Danny but I couldn’t do anything while Mum and Dad were
still in the room. Visiting hours were nearly over so I waited it out, chewing at my nails and channel-surfing while Mum probed my drug-fucked memory and Dad went back to staring out the window.
Once they’d said their goodbyes, walking out together like a normal married couple, I grabbed the phone off the nightstand and dialled the Greenwoods but there was no answer. They were
probably all at the hospital. No doubt in a room just around the corner. Next I tried Hollie’s house. Mr Bailey picked up.

‘Yes?’ He sounded strained, overwrought. He wasn’t due home from the States until Christmas but he must’ve flown in early because of Danny. ‘Who is this?’ he
demanded. The gruffness in his voice made me panic and I hung up straight away. I tried Hollie’s mobile but it was switched off. As a last resort, I called Trish at work. She’d know
what’d happened. Fat Helen answered the phone and said Trish’d called in sick. Smelling a lie, I rang her place. She answered in a croaky voice.

‘Are you really sick?’ I snapped.

‘Hey, Rosebud, I thought you were someone from work.’ There was a pause as she lit a cigarette and inhaled down the line. ‘Have the cops been up there yet?’ Her voice was
suddenly normal, if a little wired.

‘No. I don’t know. Why?’ I said, cagily.

‘I was gonna come up to see you and Bomber but I’ve been so fucked.’

‘Bomber?’

‘Yeah, didn’t you know? Right when you collapsed, some weirdo pretending to be a coon came at him with this spear thingy and punctured his kidney.’ Trish snorted.

‘Is he alright?’ I asked, relieved it was Bomber, not Scott.

‘Yeah. Scotty came by yesterday and said he was doing OK.’

Scotty?
‘But you don’t even know Scott.’

‘He was there when you collapsed. He gave you mouth to mouth while I called the ambulance.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, Rosebud,’ she said, in a changing-the-subject tone, ‘the whole night was pretty insane. You were having a spastic fit and Bomber was on the floor, blood gushing
everywhere. The ambulance guys came in and took you both to hospital. The cops were all over the place but the abo-freak got away. Scotty tells me that it was Hollie’s brother. It’s all
over the telly. What a psycho.’ I tried to interrupt but Trish was talking too fast. ‘Anyway, Scotty and me, we got a cab up to the hospital but they told us to go home but fuck, we
were still beaming off our tits, so we went back to the rave.’

‘You what?’
Across the room, the guy in the mummy bandages grumbled at me to keep it quiet. Lowering my voice, I hissed, ‘I can’t believe you did
that.’

‘Did what?’ she said, all innocent.

‘I was in some kind of coma and you and Scott went back to the rave? Whose idea was that?’

Trish sucked on her cig. She had a wheeze in her chest. ‘I think it was Scotty’s,’ she said, unfazed.

‘Then what did you do?’

‘Oh, nothing much. We came back here for a bit. Played some tunes, smoked some hash, crashed out on the couch. Serious, we were gonna come up but we reckoned your mum’d tear
strips.’

They’d fucked, I was sure of it. I wished that Danny
had
got Scott. He fucking deserved it. I was too angry, too hurt to speak, so I hung up and shoved my head under the pillow so
the other inmates couldn’t hear me crying. I tried Hollie’s mobile again, desperate now to hear her voice. It was still switched off but this time I left a message:

‘Please call me. I need to speak to you.’

Later that night, Hollie came by to visit. As soon as she saw me, she hurried over, flinging a bunch of white lilies on the bed, and kissed me on the lips.

‘Oh, my darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried about you.’ She looked paler than usual, with black shadows under her eyes and she was wearing one of her costumes
– a Medieval-style dress in crushed purple velvet with a large jewel-encrusted crucifix around her neck. After all the shit with Scott and Trish, it was like oceans of sunshine to see her,
and when she leant in and kissed me again, I held her close.

Hollie tugged off her boots and wriggled into bed with me. Her fingers, usually cold to the touch, were warm as she pulled the sheet up over our heads. She pressed her lips against my ear and
whispered, ‘Let me tell you a secret.’ Her eyes were bright with excitement like she wasn’t upset or worried at all. I was sure she was going to tell me that Danny was OK and
where he was hiding.

‘What is it?’ I urged.

Hollie hesitated, her cheeks flushed. ‘I’ve been dying to tell you since it happened but I was worried what you would think.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I whispered. ‘Tell me about Danny.’

‘This is about Danny, darling.’ She squeezed my hand under the covers.

‘Hey, visiting hours are over!’ A butch peroxided nurse ripped back the sheet and stood glowering over us. ‘That means you gotta leave, princess,’ she barked at Hollie,
who scampered out from under the covers.

‘C’mon,’ I said. We headed down the corridor, out of the ward, and took the lift down to the cafeteria on the ground floor. After two days in bed, my legs felt weak and papery,
but it was good to be walking again. Hollie got two hot chocolates out of a machine and we sat facing each other at a corner table. Apart from a woman mopping the floor and a man with his head
buried in his arms, the place was deserted.

‘Where is he?’ I started, but Hollie shook her head and kicked me hard in the shin with her boot under the table. From her bag, she pulled a leather-bound notebook and tore a small
square of the thick, creamy paper from the middle. She scribbled something with her fountain pen and pushed it across the table.

‘
He’s in the cave
.’

I grabbed Hollie’s pen and wrote on the paper:
‘What about the cops?’

She nodded and wrote: ‘
I said nothing
.’

Hollie scrunched the paper up into a tiny ball and swallowed it down with a big gulp of hot chocolate. I almost laughed. We walked out to the main entrance and sat down on a plastic bench. No
one was around.

‘So, what’s the big secret?’ I said, remembering how excited Hollie had been back in the ward.

She broke into a broad grin. ‘Well, I’m not sure what you’re’ She paused, looking down at her lap. ‘Oh, God.’

‘C’mon, Hols. Just tell me.’

‘No, it’s nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘Forget it, OK? I’ll tell you another time.’ I was too buggered to argue so we said nothing for a while. Hollie swung
her legs back and forth impatiently. I had no energy left in me but I didn’t want Hollie to go yet.

‘You know, for some reason I thought he’d got Scott,’ I said. ‘It sounds bad but I was kind of relieved when I heard it was Bomber.’

Hollie turned to me, a sudden hardness in her eyes. ‘Bomber?’

‘Yeah, you know, Scott’s mate. But then, it could’ve been anyone, couldn’t it? The police know Danny didn’t mean it, right? They know he’s ill?’ I was
testing her. Deep down I knew Danny had been after Scott. Why else had he been stalking him the past week? He must have got Bomber by accident. But I wanted to know what Hollie knew. If there was
something she wasn’t telling me.

She searched my eyes as if she knew I was bluffing. Then, jumping up from the bench, she headed for the exit. I called after her, bewildered by her reaction. Too late, she was gone through the
automatic doors, her purple skirts billowing upon a sudden hot gust of summer wind. As she ran across the road and into the night, my instinct was to go after her, but I turned and went back to the
ward, exhausted.

It was Christmas Eve morning and I was on my way to the hospital shop to scrounge up some kind of present for Mum and Randy, when I ran into Bomber. He was shuffling down the
corridor in a pair of rubber thongs and a white dressing gown. By his side was one of those metal wheelie contraptions carrying a bag of bright yellow piss. It was for this, and the look of sheer
misery on his face, that I stopped to speak to him.