The Dead I Know (15 page)

Her father had been right – Skye was devastated. She held tight, howled and sniffed, blubbered and shuddered forever. She had been wrong about death – she wasn’t used to it at all. She’d never really felt it. Other people’s dead were like pictures. Moggy – feeble old Moggy – was the real deal. Did I really know death?

To truly know death, you’d have to have loved.

In time, John emerged from the garage. He patted my shoulder and whispered his thanks. He crouched beside Skye and stroked the side of her face. When the feeling got through, she let go of me and latched onto her father’s neck. He lifted her off the ground with a groan and shushed in her ear, swaying her gently from side to side.

‘Better summon Mrs Barton,’ he said.

I did as I was told.

Mrs Barton made no sound but tears drained from her face like ice melt.

‘Poor old Moggy,’ John said. ‘She was as old as you, wasn’t she, Skye?’

Skye’s head uncurled like a turtle’s from her father’s neck. She looked at the coffin and nodded.

‘She was a good cat,’ Mrs Barton said through her tears.

A doleful silence followed. I stood with my hands clasped in front of me and waited. John caught my eye and gave me a nod but there was no button to press. I stepped forward and closed the lid of the box.

‘Can I do it?’ Skye asked. She wriggled until her dad released her, then took the coffin and lowered it neatly into the hole. She collected a handful of dirt and scattered it over the wood. I did the same. John and Mrs Barton took their turns and then the three of them went inside the house while I filled the hole.

Skye came back red-eyed with a fistful of rose petals she’d plucked from the front garden. She waited until I’d smoothed the last of the soil before arranging them just so, then turned to me.

‘Needs a cross or something.’

‘Let’s see what we can find.’

We unearthed a cut garden stake, a nail, some string. She wrote Moggy’s name neatly on the stake with black marker. I tapped it in place with the hammer.

‘Looks stupid,’ Skye said, and tore it out. She hurled it over the fence.

She levered a flat stone from the garden edge, scrawled on it with the marker and sat it at the head of the grave. Much more dignified. Perhaps there was a gene for graveside expertise?

27

A
LL THE GOODWILL
garnered during the day was swept aside when I got home. The sliding door had been forced; the contents of the van and the annex had been upended again. A sickening smell fouled the air. The television was gone; Mam’s bed had been stripped and dusted with self-
-
raising flour. The stench came from a loose coil of human excrement, served up at the kitchen table on a plate.

I ran from the van and coughed up the remains of my crustless sandwiches beside the rubbish bins. Hands on knees, I heaved and breathed until the sound of laughter nearby made me freeze. Westy watched from the half-cover of the camp kitchen. When he realized I’d seen him, he swore and ran. My revulsion turned instantly to fury and I sprinted after him.

He slipped past vans, hurdled pine logs between campsites and toppled bins and chairs to impede my passage, but only
succeeded in slowing himself down. He was still laughing. It powered the rage inside me. He skittered for the front gates but I caught him by the collar before he got there and rode him to the footpath – literally rode him. Felt the concrete beneath us skinning him. Heard the involuntary grunt as the air left his lungs. Wondered why I’d never done it before.

I had never felt like this before. Never
felt
before. Not in this way. My swing was in full motion and I knew I could go higher and harder. When Westy moved, it was to cover his head. I tore his shirt dragging him upright, slammed him into the steel Coke sign attached to the wall of the kiosk. He yelped.

‘I HAVE NOTHING OF YOURS,’ I screamed, shoving him again, pinning his head against the sign.

‘Okay, all right. It was a laugh,’ he bawled. ‘Nothing. Calm down.’

The kiosk door slammed.

‘I’m not laughing.’

‘Right.’

‘I’M NOT LAUGHING.’

Tony Long grabbed my wrist in his beefy hand and pulled me off Westy. He tried a cop-show manoeuvre – twisting my arm up my back – but I flicked and ripped my hand free. He skipped off a safe distance.

‘Calm down, Aaron,’ he said, flashing his palms.

‘I’d like to register a complaint,’ I said.

‘Oh? Would you really?’ he mocked.

‘With you or with the police. Your choice.’

He laughed. ‘With the police? This must be serious.’

A couple of kids from the houses opposite the park watched from the roadside.

‘Come and have a look at the van,’ I said.

I walked. Tony Long followed. ‘It was a joke,’ Westy moaned. ‘You take everything so seriously.’

‘Shut up, Dale,’ Tony Long said. ‘I’ve had enough of your crap.’

The plate had vanished. Mam’s chair was upright and the bedclothes had been pulled up over the flour. Someone else had been in there in the few minutes since I’d left.

‘Can you smell that?’ I asked.

‘What? I can’t smell a thing. Well, nothing I wouldn’t expect to smell in here.’

I tore back the covers to reveal the mess. The flour had been shaken onto the white linoleum floor where it was all but invisible.

Tony Long sniffed. ‘What exactly am I looking at?’

‘Flour. There, on the floor.’

‘And that’s the complaint?’

‘Westy broke into my home. He turned the place upside down.’

‘I thought it always looked like this. Cleaner than Dale’s van.’

‘He stole my television.’

‘Really?’ He sounded unconvinced.

‘Yes, really. Look around you. Can you see a television anywhere?’

‘That’s serious,’ he said, barely restraining a smile.

My hands became fists.

‘You need to calm down Aaron. If what you say is true and Dale has been in here without your permission, then
that’s a serious offence. If it happens again, I’d suggest you tell Nerida or me. Right? Under no circumstances should you take matters into your own hands. Catch my drift?’

My teeth clenched of their own accord.

‘Do . . . you . . . understand . . . me?’

‘Yes,’ I spat.

‘Where’s Mam?’ he asked, matter-of-factly. ‘Haven’t seen her around for a while.’

‘Visiting relatives,’ I said.

‘I’ll be having a word to her when she gets back. Catch my drift?’

‘Yes,’ I said again, and Tony Long left.

‘Oy, Aaron,’ he shouted from just outside the door. ‘This your TV?’

It had magically appeared beside the rubbish bin. Placed ever so delicately in my puddle of vomit.

‘Yes,’ I said once more.

‘I think you’d better get your facts straight before you start flinging around accusations.’

He sounded like a soap opera but at least I knew where I stood. My guess was he’d had his Candy on a stick. Dale West would always get the benefit of the doubt and in a showdown – my word against his – his would win before I’d even spoken.

The plate of poo had been dumped in the rubbish bin. I found it while emptying the vacuum cleaner bag. It seemed Westy had an accomplice to pull his asinine pranks with. There was only one thing I could think of more damnable than Dale West, and that was Dale West squared.

The sun had gone by the time I’d finished. I could have eaten, but the thought of making more mess and
then cleaning up more mess seemed like too much effort, and I was too keyed up for there to be any hope of sleep. I changed into a black tracksuit and walked to the hospital.

Mam was no longer in intensive care. A nurse informed me that she’d been taken to Finch Ward and that visiting hours were finished.

I hung my head. It wasn’t an affectation – I did feel the walk had been for nothing. The nurse patted my shoulder.

‘Let’s see what we can do,’ she whispered. She beckoned me along the corridor, turning this way and that until I was totally lost, eventually arriving at the doors of Finch Ward. She punched a code into an electronic lock, and I felt my stomach tighten. What kind of hospital ward needs locks on the doors?

The first thing I noticed was the sound. The moaning and crying. It sounded like a medieval dungeon. The air wasn’t quite right either – in the battle between human and chemical smells, humans were winning.

Mam was propped up on pillows watching television.

‘Mrs Rowe?’ the nurse said. ‘You have a visitor.’

She didn’t flinch, just stared at the screen.

The nurse smiled, as if to say ‘Good luck’ as she left.

At Mam’s bedside, I bent to kiss her curls.

She turned on me with her teeth bared and slapped my face with enough force to make both my ears ring.

‘What did you do that for?’ she howled. ‘What did you do that for?’

She slapped at me again but I’d covered my head and the blow cuffed my forearm.

I backed away and she was straight out of bed and after me, scratching and kicking.

‘No. Card. My. Ass,’ she bawled, punctuating with her fist and stockinged feet against my body.

The attack stopped as abruptly as it had begun and I uncovered my face to see Mam struggling with two nurses. A scream – animal and spit-flecked – burst from her lips as she thrashed against their grip. One of the nurses called a name and a female doctor arrived and administered an injection in Mam’s behind. Mam lost her footing almost instantly and she flailed in the nurses’ arms for the longest minute before they lifted her back onto the bed.

‘Are you okay?’ the doctor asked.

I nodded.

She rested a hand on my shoulder and surveyed my exposed skin. ‘Gail, could you tend to these scratches, please.’

‘Of course, Doctor,’ one of the nurses said. She took me by the elbow and led me to the nurses’ station, where she dabbed something cold on my face. It stung but not enough to rouse a reaction from me. I was numb again.

‘Dementia patients can be unpredictable,’ the nurse said. ‘Hard to read them at first, but once you get used to their individual quirks it does get easier.’

Dementia
. She’d laid the diagnosis out plainly. I’d spent so long denying Mam’s behaviour and hoping she’d snap out of it that having it acknowledged by somebody else, having the lid taken off the secret that was never really a secret, filled me with relief.

‘She’ll sleep until tomorrow, now,’ the nurse said. ‘You right to get home?’

‘Of course,’ I said, but I had my doubts. The caravan seemed light years away. Heavy-limbed sleep was calling but it never called in the soft voices of pillows and clouds; it cackled and beckoned with a bony finger.

28

He’s shouting but it’s no use, the ringing in my ears has made me deaf. I feel his wet sputter and the heat of his breath on my cheeks. His black eyes, pinched and cruel, are the hell where my every fear is spawned. He grabs my hair and hauls me across the room.

The pulling hair woke me, dragging me from the dream. I jerked free and a hank was torn from my scalp.

Pre-dawn. My surroundings were underexposed and heavy with shadow but I knew where I was – the cigarette butt-strewn vestibule of the lookout by the beach.

David was there somewhere, I knew it.

A clap of bird wings made me panic and run, down the lookout stairs – three at a time – onto the sand and to the water’s edge. It was a full minute before I could sensibly draw the line between asleep and awake. Clearly, the
more sleep-starved and crazy I became, the more fragile the line between worlds grew. There was no David – I’d slept on a bench and my hair had been caught in the seat. My subconscious had painted the nightmare to match my circumstances, not the other way around.

Light rain fell. I hugged myself as I walked and felt it –
-
cool and undeniably real – on my neck. I was still wearing the runners and tracksuit I’d been wearing at the hospital, and to the joggers braving the foreshore track I would have looked like one of them, out to work up a morning sweat. I would have been sweating when I made it home, too, if I hadn’t been so cold to begin with.

The van was how I’d left it. I ate a token breakfast and showered. The scratch on my cheek didn’t look as angry. My eyes were bloodshot and dark circles had formed in the pale skin around them. I could make my hair neat and my tie straight but I could do little about the state of my face.

John looked twice.

‘Morning, Aaron,’ he said. ‘Everything okay?’

I forced some extra chirp into my voice. ‘Yes. Fine. Why?’

He shrugged. ‘Wrong end of the day to be looking as tired as you do. How’s Mam?’

‘Stable,’ I said. I wanted to tell him more. I had the fleeting desire to tell him a lot more, but old habits and the fear of revealing too much made the words congeal in my throat.

‘Good,’ he eventually said.

The welcome breeze of industry swept us up – three coffins to build, a pick-up from a private residence in Singer Street, crustless sandwiches and a loud television, flowers
delivered and arranged in the chapel, the newcomer to wash and dress in the afternoon. Driving lesson in the golfclub car park.

Every little action, every practical thought, every aspect of the work recharged my batteries. By the end of my driving lesson, I was in control of the car, in control of my emotions, in control of this one slice of my life.

‘Have you been studying your book?’ John asked.

‘It makes sense,’ I said. ‘It’s easy to learn.’

‘We’ll book you in for your test tomorrow.’

My heart stopped. One beat. Two beats. I’d missed three beats before normal transmission was restored. ‘Okay.’

John sent me inside for tea while he phoned and booked the test.

Skye was tucked up against the armrest of the couch. I smiled at her. She didn’t respond. I put the kettle on but Mrs Barton shooed me out of the kitchen.

‘Go and sit. I’ll make the tea,’ she grumbled.

I propped next to Skye and watched the adverts.

‘How you feeling?’ I said to the television.

‘Fine,’ Skye breathed. ‘Except my cat died. You?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Your eyes are all black. You’ve been taking drugs again, haven’t you?’