WATERSKY It was the party, that’s where it started. The three women who would have such a huge effect on his life were ...
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WATERSKY It was the party, that’s where it started. The three women who would have such a huge effect on his life were all there. Gerra, she’d always been around — they’d kind of grown up together. But suddenly, Brodie’s seeing her as if for the first time. And he likes what he sees. Heather — budding psychologist, perfect daughter, model student, grade A do-gooder — everything Brodie’s not. And Jana. Well, who knows? She’s off the planet. One thing’s certain though, from the night of that party, Brodie’s life was a rollercoaster and nothing would be the same again.
Terry Whitebeach is a writer who has lived in Central Australia for the past few years. She has four adult c h i l d ren, none of whom wished to move to such a hot place.
They
stayed
in
Tasmania and Victoria. Her first collection of poetry, Bird D re a m (Penguin, 1993), won the Anne Elder Aw a rd and was short listed for the 1994 Western Australian Pre m i e r’ s Book Awards. Watersky is her first novel.
WATERSKY TERRY WHITEBEACH
FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS
First published 1998 by FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS 193 South Terrace (POBox 320), South Fremantle Western Australia 6162. http://www.facp.iinet.net.au Copyright © Terry Whitebeach, 1998. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant Editor Alwyn Evans. Designer John Douglass. Production Manager Cate Sutherland. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by Sands Print Group. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data Whitebeach, Terry. Watersky. ISBN 1 86368 213 9. I. Title. A823.3 The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission.
Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation
For Simon Kisling and his mates
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank my friends Carrie Brink and Lyn Woolley, and my children, Simon, Rebecca and Michael Brown, for their intelligent reading and discussion of the various drafts, and for patiently waiting for the book to be finished. I thank Dr Richard Rossiter, Edith Cowan University, and Fremantle Arts Centre Press editor Alwyn Evans, for energetic support and useful critiques, and Jenny Pausacker for stirring conversation.
In writing this book, the author was assisted by an initial grant from Arts Tasmania and by a category B Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The passages on pages 8 and 224 are from These Branching Moments by Rumi (a thirteenth century Sufi poet, born in Afghanistan), translated by John Moyne and Coleman Banks, 1988 edition. They are reproduced with permission of Copper Beech Press, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
WAT E R S K Y is a term coined in A n t a rctic exploration. When ice pilots are searching for a passage t h rough sea ice, they look for reflected blueness in the sky: this indicates clear water ahead, even if the way through is not apparent.
When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools dig your way out through the bottom to the ocean. There is a secret medicine given to those who hurt so hard they cannot hope. Rumi
1
BRODIE The first time I saw Jana I thought she was a crazy arrogant bitch. I’m outa here, I told myself, but for some reason it didn’t work out that way. It was at one of Gerra’s off-the-show barbies. She always invited the whole world. Her family as well. She didn’t believe in the generation gap. Her folks were pretty cool, but some of the other people she dragged along from time to time were weird, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been spun out by Jana. But I was. It was raining this particular day. Everyone was jammed into Gerra’s flat, and as I pushed my way t h rough the crowd I saw this weird woman perched like a buzzard on a stool by the stereo. Tall and skinny with grey-streaked hair and the most spun-out eyes you’ve ever seen. She was checking everyone out, like a queen looking down 9
at the peasants. Then suddenly, she started twisting on her perch like she was searching for someone in particular. Straight away I knew it was me. Don’t ask me how, I just did. Maybe it was the cold tingle up my backbone, or the itch that started up in my brain. Watch it Brodie-lad, the thought policeman on duty in my head snapped out, she’s trouble. I i g n o red him and inched into the room. I’ll just sneak past and check her out from a distance, I told myself, but I made more of an entrance than I’d planned, backing into two old scrubbers who were hugging and kissing each other like something out of the movies. I’d just picked myself up when this screech blasted out over the talk and music. ‘Fenna!’ It was the buzzard. I jumped. Looked around. A mistake. She was onto me. ‘Fenna wait!’ she screeched, staggering down off the stool and heading towards me. ‘Dear one, at last I’ve found you!’ My curiosity faded right there! I ducked t h rough the crowd and headed towards the kitchen, but she rushed after me, yelling ‘Fenna! Fenna! Dear One!’ It was off - t h e - s h o w. People looked over to see what the row was about. I could’ve died. She dug her claws into my shoulder and grabbed on like a vice, crying and slobbering and croaking ‘Fenna!’ sixty to the dozen. I started to sweat seriously. ‘Brodie,’ I muttered. ‘Brodie McPherson’s the name. You must have the wrong person.’ 10
I tried to free my shoulder, but carefully. She was obviously off her face and the worst thing you can do when someone’s spun out on drugs or booze is argue with them. I could act the nicely brought up lad if I had to, but it pissed me right off. What was this stupid old bat doing drunk as a pissant at five o’clock in the afternoon? So much for Gerra’s ‘we can have a good time without getting legless.’ She was right, in a way, we did have a good time, but usually after the olds had gone and there was just the gang left. The heavy metal went on and the bongs were passed around and some serious drinking started. ‘ O k a y,’ I agreed in the end, to shut her up. ‘Fenna it is. Didn’t catch your name, sorry.’ Well, she really turned it on then. Her face collapsed, like my dog Brad’s, when I’d promised him a walk for hours and hours and we ended up not going. ‘Why have you betrayed me?’ she howled. ‘Why did you let them take the Memories from you?’ And she put her head in her hands and rocked backwards and forwards moaning shit, like, ‘You knew the risk! You promised!’ That sort of stuff, over and over, like a broken record. Stuff about never being able to go back home if the Song Cycles were lost and about me being tricked by some dudes called the Controllers. Full on! I suppose I could have played along but all I wanted was for someone to get this nut case off my neck, and fast, before my nicely-brought-uplad routine cracked up completely. But she kept it up, full bore. It was I who had all 11
the stories of the clans and who should sing them. That threw me: I used to be in choirs and stuff when I was a kid, had even thought about singing in a band once, but I’d never done anything about it. How could she have known? She was just raving, that’s all. I’d promised to resist, she reckoned, vowed to honour the Questers. Unreal. It was like being in a movie where you didn’t know the script but the director was getting hysterical because you were stuffing up your lines. I was just planning to get hysterical myself, when Gerry came over. She sussed the scene in two seconds flat, and launched straight into her social worker act. ‘Jana,’ she purred, nice as pie, ‘I was wondering where you were. I haven’t been looking after you at all. It’s stopped raining, so let’s go out and see if Dad’s got the Weber going yet.’ I waited till Gerry had steered the bombed-out duchess out of range, then nicked into the kitchen. Jana. So that was her name. Well, hello Jana and goodbye. ‘Who the hell is she?’ I demanded when Gerry came into the kitchen to get more chips and stuff a while later. She could see I was pissed off but she just laughed and shook her head. Introduced me instead to some chick who was carefully rinsing glasses and lining them up on a tea towel to drain. Ultra-straight. Mum would have loved her. ‘Brodie, meet Heather Enright.’ I mumbled hello. Tried to catch Gerra’s eye. ‘Heather’s at uni. Studying psych.’ Great. She’d feel at home with this lot then. 12
‘Brodie McPherson, a friend of mine. A bit antisocial, but he’s okay. No major complexes.’ Heather smiled uncertainly. ‘Gerra …’ I muttered. ‘Catch you later, Fenna!’ she laughed and lifted the chips bowls past her mother and aunty, who were buttering rolls, flat chat. They smiled. I gave them a sick grin back. The whole family’s terminally hospitable. I stood there like a dork, trying to think of something to say to this chick I’d known for two seconds of my life and intended never to set eyes on again, once the party was over. She got the message and turned back to the sink, her face all red. I hung round the kitchen for a while, sucking on a fantasy of beating the crap out of Jana while everyone stood round watching, Miss Straight Chick included, too scared to do anything, and Gerry crying and begging me to stop. Like hell, it would probably be Gerry beating the crap out of me. After a while I looked to see if the coast was clear. I couldn’t see Jana at first, then I spotted her in the corner with Dog, still going fifty to the dozen, but in a quieter voice. Dog’d listen to anyone. Gerry was bopping away with Ben and Rob and Kath by the stereo, and through the glass doors I could see Gerry’s dad waving the tongs about and bellowing with laughter. Gerry beckoned me, but I shook my head and ducked back into the kitchen. I didn’t feel like raging. Odd sorta girl, Gerry. We’d known each other most of our lives, and gone out with each other 13
since year nine. She was always popular with the kids, although some of the teachers’d really had it in for her. Her attitude leaves much to be desired, our year ten pastoral group teacher put on her re p o r t , which simply meant that she took shit from no one, teachers included. What they never seemed to notice was, that she was always rescuing some fleabag mutt, or sticking up for some punkhead little kid, or collecting money to save the whales or the forests or some damn thing or another. And she was smart. That’s probably why they hated her most, because she hardly did anything in class, and yet she breezed through exams and assessments with top marks. That really burned them up. She’d been nearly kicked out of school hundreds of times; for smoking, answering back, nicking off from school, that sort of stuff. She had guts. Not like me, playing it safe most of the time. Told myself I owed it to Mum and Dad, but it was because I was piss weak basically. Gerra had more energy than anyone I ever met. Not like me, a geriatric cot case at nineteen. And the worse part was I’d felt like it for years, no matter how much I played Mr Cool. I knew she was keen on me but the last few months I’d backed right off, told her we ought to go out with other people, not get too serious. I didn’t want her to twig how close to the edge I was getting. She was surprised, I think, and a bit hurt, but I could h a rdly tell her the truth — that I was just too stuffed to feel anything. Tired. At nineteen. I’d be ready for the vegie hospital next. 14
I rescued my jacket from the heap in the hall, and split. No one noticed. Gerry’d be pissed off when she found out, but I’d had enough. All that shit about Song Cycles and heroines and stuff. I w o n d e red what Jana had been on. Booze, probably, and some sort of uppers. A pretty lethal combination if you can’t handle the stuff. Not that I could talk. I’d staged my own big h e ro act about a year ago, one time when I’d smoked about an ounce and been into the Bundy as well. Announced that I’d worked out how to fly. I started by doing chin-ups off the balcony till I slipped and hit the concrete twenty feet below. Broke both wrists and nearly shook my teeth out. My wrists still ache a bit when it’s cold. Mum spat it, of course. Couldn’t understand the foolish risk I’d taken, and me such a sensible, careful boy. Sensible. Careful. No wonder I was a dried out turd at nineteen. I drove home like a maniac, scaring the pants off two old grannies waddling home from their bingo. They tutted and waved at me. I gave them the f i n g e r. Trouble was it didn’t make me feel any better. Brad was barking and hurling himself against the door as I dragged myself up the fire escape and felt around in the dark under the brick for the door key. Something slimy and disgusting was oozing out of a split garbage bag. That sleaze-bag Atlas, I’d told him fifty times it was his turn to put them out. Now the neighbourhood cats’d spread the stuff for miles. Well, guess who wouldn’t be picking it up. 15
The flat was turning into a tip, fast. At this rate we’d end up evicted. I wasn’t so hot on housework, but compared with me, Atlas was a cot case. Cooking and cleaning just didn’t come into his definition of worthwhile human activities. Not much did, except for girls and skating. He was good, I had to admit: he’d won a heap of competitions and there was talk of his getting sponsorship to go to the States. Maybe I’d give up the flat and move back home if he did. Let Mum look after the garbage and everything else. She’s really into looking after people. Have you had a nice day, do you want more gravy, are you working too hard, worried about anything, is there anything I can help you with? She’s about the most considerate person you ever met. It drives me crazy. ‘Is that you, dear?’ she’d call out, no shit, every time I came into the house. Once I’d said no, it was an axe-murdering rapist. That really upset her, even though I’d apologised eight million times. ‘What sort of a day did you have?’ would be the next question, then ‘How about a nice cup of tea?’ Always sussing out my head space, the state of my innards, the exact level of my happiness, unhappiness, health, well-being … She would’ve had a field day if she’d known how RS I felt most of the time. ‘Is it your job? Are you happy? Perh a p s you’re coming down with something. Let me feel your forehead. What about a nice hot lemon drink? A bath? A tonic? Warmer underwear?’ There’s no way I could go back to being five years old again, wrapped in cotton wool, every16
thing taken care of, but I had to admit there didn’t seem to be a lot going for independence and adulthood as I crouched in the dark, grotting around in the cold among spilled baked bean cans and empty stubbies. The world’s your oyster, my old man told me, about twenty times a day. And every time, I wanted to slam my fist in his face. My wonderful teenage years. They sucked. They absolutely sucked. In fact life in general sucked. A kiddies’ fairy tale they told you so you’d run round all your life chasing something that wasn’t worth having. So you wouldn’t kick even when you were being eaten up with cancer or AIDS or sucked dry, like those leathery old goanna skins we used to find down at the shack when I was a little kid. All grey and curled up, the guts eaten away and only the claws and skin left. I got the door open at last and Brad charged out. The canine cannonball, Atlas called him. He rushed up and down the stairs barking, sure we were going to set off for a mega-walk. ‘Not tonight mate,’ I said, and his ears flopped down and his eyes went all soft and gooey and pleading. ‘I’m too zonked.’ I kicked my boots off and fell into bed. Didn’t even hear Atlas come in. I was blobbing out in front of the TV the next night, munching out on one of Silvano’s pizzas, when the phone rang. It was Gerry, and she was majorly pissed off at me. Accused me of sneaking off while she was taking Jana home. I should have called her. 17
‘I suppose it would’ve killed you to have said goodbye?’ ‘I was tired.’ ‘ Ti red. I see. That’s what you’d tell Tanya I suppose?’ So, she was going to fight dirty. ‘Oh, up yours!’ I snapped, before I’d engaged my brain. Sarcasm does that to me. I just can’t stand it. The dead silence on Gerry’s end told me I’d better do something fast, before we ended up in a full-on row. She was about the only good thing in my life right then. I didn’t want her hating me, as well as everything else. Especially as the Tanya thing had been a non-event. Sure, I’d fallen for her, or so I’d thought. Go for it, Gerry told me, and see how far you get. She gave me heaps the night we saw Tanya with that private school pinhead, Hugh Broughton, at the Red Boar. He had most people fooled, Tanya included, it seemed, with his bulging pecs and his neat little MG sports car. You could spray paint the Mazda, Gerry suggested sarcastically, or get into body sculpting. I’d asked for it. It didn’t even occur to me to think about how she’d felt listening to me dribble on about some other girl. ‘Sorry, Gerra.’ Nothing. Longer silence. ‘No shit, I really don’t feel so hot at the moment.’ That did it. The Geraldine Finch one woman rescue team swung into action. She suggested hyperium, aspirin, a massage, a doctor, in the one breath, and offered to come round right away if I needed looking after. I said thanks, but I’d just 18
grab an early night. She went a bit quiet after that but it was her next remark that really threw me. She was as nosy as Mum, in her own way. ‘This hasn’t got anything to do with that business with Jana?’ I hedged a bit. ‘Well, yes and no.’ ‘Look, she’s okay. A bit off the air, but …’ ‘A bit! Like those terrorists on the television docos!’ Gerry giggled. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Those mad eyes. And the way she went on like she’s a queen or something and I’d betrayed her.’ ‘How come she got to you so much?’ Gerry asked. What could I say that didn’t make me seem as crazy as Jana? ‘I told you. I’m on a bit of a downer. You don’t expect to have to deal with a head case at a party.’ Then I got it. Of course! I should have guessed. ‘She’s a real head case, isn’t she? I mean, from the hospital?’ The disapproving vibes coming down the phone told me I’d hit it. I felt sick. One of Gerry’s strays. A real crazy, who thought she was God Almighty, and that I was her bosom buddy pretending not to know her. It reminded me of that sick joke Dad had told at dinner one night about the three crazies who all reckoned they were God, and couldn’t decide which of them was the father, the son or the holy ghost. I don’t remember the punch line but I remember the look on Mum’s face when he told it. 19
‘Jokes about those less fortunate are unkind, Kevin,’ her voice so quiet you could hardly hear it, ‘and blasphemy is not what I’d hoped my child would hear from his father.’ And Dad had gone all silent, and glared at me as if it was my fault. It took a while after that for things to get back to normal. Then, only a few weeks later I heard that old fart Mr McGinty, Dad’s boss, telling Dad the same joke at the company’s family barbecue and Dad had laughed his head off. My father the fraud. For some reason I started thinking about when I got my first bike. Mum and Dad are not my real parents, but I didn’t mind about being adopted. Hardly gave it a thought. The bike was red. It had a bell and a rack at the back to hold my school bag. They’d been so excited pointing all this out to me that there was no way I could tell them the bike sucked. I’d picked out the one I liked, when they let slip they were getting me one for Christmas. Black, with yellow wheel trims and matching yellow handgrips — I’d been checking it out in the bike shop window for months. Instead, I got this sissy red thing. The only kid without a BMX, and I had to act pleased. I think they guessed. I never took it to school and rode it only at the shack where there were plenty of other daggy bikes, but they never said anything. They were like that, Mum and Dad, a bit dumb and sort of old fashioned. I was their only kid too so it wasn’t as if I could have passed it down and got the bike I wanted. They wouldn’t have understood anyway; there was no point trying to 20
explain. I just got pissed off with them, and then felt guilty about being pissed off, even though they were the ones who had given me the dumb bike. Family stuff’s heavy. That’s why I got out as soon as I left school, even though it meant living with a slob like Atlas. Gerry was yelling that she might as well be talking to fresh air for all the effect it was having. I mumbled an apology. Suddenly I couldn’t bear sitting there one more minute, hanging off the phone. Not even for her. ‘Look, I gotta go, Gerra, I just remembered Atlas and I are playing squash tonight.’ ‘I thought you were tired.’ Women can be so sarcastic. When we said goodbye her voice was icy. I’d really blown it. I lit a cigarette, took a few drags then butted it out. It tasted like dirt. Stared at the TV for a while and thought about calling her back, but I knew I’d just end up making things worse. ‘C’mon Brad, walk!’ I yelled, and the dopey mutt, who one millisecond earlier had been sprawled on the couch snoring, lunged towards the door as though his life depended on it. How come I was the only one in the world with no energy? I’d had Brad for three years. I’d named him after that guy in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. God, I loved that movie. It was so bent. A whole bunch of us used to go and see it every Friday night at the Odeon. We’d laugh ourselves silly. We practically knew it off by heart. And when this scrappy little mongrel turned up at our place, 21
there was something about him that reminded me of the guy in the movie. So when Dad said I could keep him, I named him Brad on the spot. He’d g rown into a scr u ffy looking, stumpy-legged brute, but he thought he was pretty cute. So did I. I opened the door and he charged down the stairs into the street. It was cold, so I went back up for my bluey. Brad barked impatiently. It’s all right for you dogs, I told him. Mean little gusts of sleety wind blew dead leaves and old junk mail around my ankles. I turned up my collar, hunched down into my bluey and headed off. Brad rushed ahead, barking at leaves and cars and rushing after kids on skateboards. ‘Shut up mutt!’ I yelled, but he just got loopier, dancing around me, barking his head off, with a lopsided grin on his silly face. And if you think dogs can’t smile, just watch them sometime. E v e n t u a l l y, he reigned himself in and marc h e d along at heel. We went a lot further than I meant to and we were out along the beach road halfway to the headland when the first drops of icy rain started to fall. Now we’ll get soaked, I told Brad, and it’s all their fault, Jana’s, Gerry’s, Mum’s and Dad’s and the idiots who’d conceived me in the first place. I think of my mind as a filter system. Most of the stuff that goes in — thoughts, feelings, conversations, stuff like that — is filtered through and ends up in the sludge pit somewhere in the bottom of my brain, in a sort of mental compost heap. But every now and then, something gets caught and won’t slip through, and forces me to 22
pay attention. It might take months, years even, before I find out why it hasn’t disappeared along with the rest. And until I work out why, it just sits there, itching away. Like the tiredness, and not being able to get things right with Gerry. And now this business with the buzzard. Because, no matter how I looked at it, I just couldn’t work out why Jana’d got to me so much. The fairy tale stuff about the Song Cycles, about being betrayed by this Fenna dude, my panic when she insisted I was Fenna, her panic when I insisted I wasn’t. It made me feel unsafe, as if I’d never be certain of anything again. Suddenly I was yelling into the dark sky, but only the wind howled back. There ought to have been somebody listening, somebody who could fix things, and if there wasn’t I wanted out. Brad thought I was yelling at him and he lowered his ears and tail. ‘It’s all right boy,’ I told him, but his tail stayed down and his eyes kept apologising. We slunk home together, me half frozen, Brad crawling behind like a bedraggled shadow.
23
2
BRODIE The phone was ringing when I got in. It was Mum. I shrugged out of my wet jacket. She was worried because she hadn’t heard from me for a week, so she’d stayed home from her quilt making class to ring me. Dad had told her not to worry, but she thought she’d ring anyway. Mothers’ intuition you know. ‘And you’re sure you’re all right, Brodie?’ she asked for the six millionth time. I could just see her standing among all the pot plants in the sun room and going through a thousand possibilities of disaster which may have overtaken her precious son in the week since she’d last heard his voice. Anticipating the next question, I reached for a mug with my other hand, switched on the tap with my elbow. The Mega Bs she’d given me were still sitting on the bench. I fizzed 24
one into the water and gulped it down. ‘ Yes, I’m taking my vitamins, Mum,’ I said before she had time to ask me. ‘And, I’m getting enough sleep.’ ‘No need to be clever about it, Brodie,’ she said and gave me her rave about looking after myself while I was young and still lucky enough to have my health. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a thought d ropped into my head, and before my brain engaged properly I opened my big mouth. ‘Mum,’ I blurted out. She stopped in mid-flight. ‘Yes dear.’ I decided to stop right there. ‘It’s nothing.’ She wouldn’t take no for an answer: she turned her mothers’ ESP onto me full bore, so in the end I had to say something. ‘ Well, it’s not really that important, I just wondered …’ ‘Yes Brodie?’ Ever so casually, as if I were talking about the w e a t h e r, ‘Do you reckon babies can re m e m b e r things?’ Her voice was wary. ‘I’m not sure I quite understand, dear.’ ‘Well, you know when you and Dad first got me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you reckon, before that, I mean, I’d remember anything?’ ‘Why do you want to know?’ ‘No reason.’ (Liar!) ‘I just thought of it. Just then. You know the way stuff comes into your head. I just wondered that’s all.’ 25
‘What is it Brodie?’ Her voice was tense, edgy. ‘Something you feel Dad and I haven’t been able to give you?’ She didn’t wait for my answer, just started going on about how much she and Dad had wanted me. How they’d waited and waited and finally brought me home, and how sweet I’d been, my dear little hands and feet, my big brown eyes. How I’d smiled at them the first day and people said they’d never seen a happier, healthier baby. How the time before they got me didn’t count and she couldn’t understand why I wanted to drag up the past when there was only hurt in it for everyone. I got her calmed down and off the phone at last, after telling her about three million times I was perfectly happy with the way she and Dad had brought me up. I knew she’d brood about it for the next six months and if she told Dad I’d get his heavy rave about ingratitude the next time I went over. Every time Mum spun out he blamed me. I wished I’d never even thought that stuff, much less said it. And I probably wouldn’t have if the big guilt trip Jana’d laid on me hadn’t got me wondering about what you actually could and couldn’t re m e m b e r. Now I’d upset Mum, and Gerry probably hated my guts as well. For the six millionth time I wished I’d never set eyes on Jana. I hung about for a while listening to my Pink Floyd tape. I was tired, but too strung out to relax, and there was no point going to bed; sure as I got to sleep Atlas’d come barging in like a runaway elephant. So in the end, I grabbed my racquet and 26
gear and headed down to Squashworld. I’m a pennant player. B grade, but not a bad hit. I didn’t know if I’d get a game that late at night, but as soon as I walked in, Peterson Schultz was onto me like a leech. I usually couldn’t stand the guy, he was such a nerd. But I felt like getting my aggro out on someone, so I said, ‘Okay, you’re on.’ I saw this old movie on TV once: the Jews in Egypt, they were slaves and they had to pull these big blocks of stone on rollers, building the pyramids. The Ten Commandments, it was called, about Moses and stuff. There was this old lady, she was Moses’ mother, only he didn’t know of course, because he’d lived in the palace since the princess got him out of the river, where his real mother, the old lady, only she was younger then, put him in a basket for the princess to find. Well anyway, Moses’ mother was the one who had to put the grease under the rollers, so the stone blocks could be pulled. She got her belt caught, and in the movie you see the great big block of stone getting closer and closer and just when she’s gunna be squashed, Moses comes along and rescues her, ’cause although he lives in the palace and stuff he’s not a baddie like the rest of them. I kept thinking how that old woman must have felt just before the stone went to roll over her: the same way I felt. Only there was no Moses in my movie. It made me madder than hell, and the madder I got the harder I slammed that little black ball, and the wilder the shots got. And the wilder I got the more Schultz stirred me. ‘You got something personal against this ball?’ 27
His goon face screwed up laughing. ‘Whose head a re you bashing in now?’ That sort of shit. He fancied himself a psychologist. I was determined to beat him. We played three games in a row and I lost all three. ‘Concentration impaired by thoughts of revenge,’ Schultz intoned, in his know-it-all uni student way, as we peeled our gear off in the shower room. ‘Boy fantasises squash ball is his f a t h e r ’s head. Unmistakable signs of Oedipus complex I believe.’ ‘Shove it, Dr Freud.’ ‘Every boy’s desire, they say, is to kill his father and marry his mother. Of course, these days it’s probably the other way round, but watch out for AIDS won’t you laddie?’ and he fell about laughing at his excruciating wit. He might have been at uni but he was as dumb an arsehole as you’d want to meet. ‘Uni getting to you, is it?’ I said, in my deadliest voice, but he didn’t bite, just reminded me who it was won all three games and kept on towelling himself and grinning like an ape. I picked up my gear and left. I was pooped. But as I climbed the stairs to the flat for the third time that night, I decided suddenly that I was going to get the b u z z a rd off my case. I’d go and see her, in the vegie ward if I had to, and tell her to lay off, to put this Fenna stuff in her pipe and smoke it, as the old man is so fond of saying. Yes, that’s what I’d do, get Gerra to arrange it for me. That’d be a way of making up with her. Then maybe I’d try and smooth things over with Mum. Having worked all 28
that out I fell asleep and for the second night in a row slept like a log. Perhaps deciding to do something, anything, was the trick. I flexed on early the next morning, first time in weeks. It was a wonder the building didn’t collapse. Taxation Department, that was where I worked, Debt Management. Clerk. Not the world’s most inspiring job, but what else would you expect. Dad’s a clerk too, Attorney General’s Department. A fairly routine existence, he admits, but it has its moments. I can’t imagine what they’d be. Why he hasn’t gone round the twist working there his whole life I don’t know, but he seems to think it’s okay to spend your life shuffling a pile of stupid forms around. When I was a kid, I always imagined that I’d do something amazing when I grew up. Instead of that I’d grown up ordinary. Average size, average looking, the usual number of zits, not good at anything in particular. Not special at all. A failure, a big fat zero. They never said anything, but you just knew, same as I knew they’d rather have had their own kid than someone else’s reject. If I thought about it too much I ended up a mess of raw jumping nerves, like those guys in the jungle, in Predator, that’d been skinned and hung up in the trees. I’d been walking around without my skin for years. No wonder I was worn down to the marrow of my little radioactive, DDT impregnated bone cells. Worn out from the shit that came at you from everywhere. I’d tried to explain it to Mum once, but she said it was no good dwelling on such morbid things. She’d quote from the Bible, 29
‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’ Every now and then I’d make an effort. Take the skateboard out and forget everything. The wind in my hair as I fly up the ramp, twist in the air and curve into a fancy dive. It gives you a real high, skating, but it doesn’t last. Afterwards it’s the same old shit. The Taxation Department got less than their money’s worth from me that day. I shuffled a few forms around, but mostly I just sat at my desk, staring into space. Not that anyone ever killed themselves with hard work in our section, but I was a bit over the top, even for Debt Management. Even Shep, the pea brain at the next desk who spent most of his time listening to the radio or hanging around the photocopier trying to crack onto Patrizia, this really cute Italian girl, commented in the end. ‘What’s up with you? Heavy date last night?’ ‘Something like that,’ I mumbled. Anything to get him off my case. Not that it worked. He went into this long rave about if there was anything eating me I could tell him, no worries. I said there was nothing wrong, drop it, but of course he didn’t. ‘No, come on man, there’s something getting to you, I can tell.’ ‘No shit.’ ‘Fight with the girlfriend, eh?’ He wasn’t going to let up. ‘Yeah, something like that.’ ‘Then take it from me, apologise mate. Doesn’t matter who was wrong, your life’s not worth 30
living unless you admit it was you. In fact …’ The phone rang then, luckily, or I would have got one of his full-on raves. That guy’s a total airhead. ‘Debt Management. Brodie McPherson speaking.’ ‘Brodie?’ It was Gerry. Sounding stressed out. Must have been ringing from the hospital, probably ducking the ward sister or something. I decided to get in quickly with my apologies, not because of Shep’s l e c t u re, but because I couldn’t stand the shit between us. She was too important to me, even if I hadn’t wanted to admit it. ‘Listen Gerra, I’m sorry about last night, and the party and all.’ T h e re was a little silence: I could hear the wheels in her brain clicking over. I tried again. ‘I really am sorry.’ ‘All right.’ ‘No hard feelings?’ ‘Okay.’ I just about collapsed with relief at that. Here I’d been a total nerd and she’d said okay, just like that. This girl really was something. One of the things I’d always loved about her was that she didn’t hold grudges. ‘Wanna go for a coffee after you finish at the hospital tonight?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Pick you up about five thirty then.’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Catch you, Gerra.’ ‘Bye Brodie.’ 31
Shep was earwigging so I grabbed a bunch of query forms and hot-footed it over to the supervisor’s desk, before he could start quizzing me. It didn’t occur to me till ages later that Gerry hadn’t actually got round to saying why she’d rung. I hadn’t given her a chance. Then I remembered her voice on the phone, quiet, and sort of anxious, not her usual style at all. Maybe she was in trouble. I was so used to her looking after everyone else, and so wrapped in my own needs that I hadn’t stopped to think that maybe she’d needed something from me. I worked myself into such a spin worrying about what might be on her mind that I ended up late leaving work, then there was peak hour traffic, so it was nearly six o’clock by the time I got to the hospital. As I screeched in I spotted Gerry on the walkway, talking to some hunky guy. A doctor, I figured. And that was when the penny dropped. True. I hadn’t known I loved her, not till that minute. Till I saw her standing there, a separate person, talking to this other guy. All those years together. Buddies, I’d told myself. None of this sloppy stuff with my old mate, Gerry. What sort of pea brain can you be! This girl was my breath, my life, she was everything good and clean and hopeful that I could ever imagine. And I hadn’t ever realised it. No wonder she’d been pissed off about that business with Tanya! That I’d mistaken the tizz I got into over Tanya for love, when all the time it was there with Gerry, fair and square, the re a l thing. The big L. And now it looked like she’d got sick of waiting, and found herself something 32
better than Brodie McPherson, mediocre-man. She saw me and waved and came over to the car with Dr Spunk tagging along. My gut twisted into a knot. Play it cool boy, I warned myself. Gerry grinned hello. ‘Brodie, this is Malcolm Higham, the new psych re g i s t r a r. Mal, Bro d i e McPherson, a friend of mine.’ Friend? Was that all? Don’t suppose you could blame her. I was lucky even to be rated a friend, the way I’d been lately. And if you want to change that to something more to your liking my boy, you’d better get your act together, starting right now, I told myself. I reached over and opened the door, giving Dr Spunk a sick grin. ‘G’day, Malcolm. Hop in, Gerra.’ She smiled at me again, then back at big shot Mal. ‘Brodie, can we give Mal a lift? It’s on our way. Harrington Street.’ I made my voice very casual. ‘Sure. That’s cool.’ ‘Thanks mate,’ he said, sliding into the back seat. Watch it jerk! You’re no mate of mine. (Caveman Brodie raises his club, fights off intruder.) I put my arm round Gerry and gave her a kiss. No harm in letting this dude know what the score was, though it didn’t stop them talking shop non-stop together all the way through town, as though they’d known each other a million years, and I was just the chauffeur. I was ready to spit it by the time we got to his place and when he asked us in for a coffee. For one terrible moment I thought Gerra was going to say yes. ‘Thanks anyway, Mal,’ she said, ‘but Brodie and 33
I have a date.’ And gave me such a sweet smile, that I felt even more of a loser. ‘Yeah, see you Malcolm.’ I tried to sound cool as I threw a U-bolt and headed back up Harrington Street. Gerry went silent, her batteries flat, now dear Malcolm had gone. Finally, the thought started to penetrate my thick head that Gerra might have something eating her that had nothing to do with me or with Dr Spunk. I made my voice very casual. ‘What’s up then, Thomasina?’ It’s our private joke, because of her name. Tom and Jerry, you know, the cartoon about the cat and mouse. We’d started it years ago when we were just little kids. I used to chase her round the playground, meowing, and she’d squeal and giggle. Then one day, when we were about eight or nine, she told me we were going to swap names. ‘Why?’ I asked, after she’d made me cross my heart and spit to promise I wouldn’t tell. ‘So I can chase you!’ she’d yelled. And she had, round and round the playground and tickled me half to death when she caught me. ‘Can girls be called Tom?’ I’d asked my mother that night while she was tucking me in. ‘Not usually dear, unless it’s a nickname, or short for another name, like Thomasina.’ And after she’d turned off the light and gone away, I lay in bed for ages, smiling, and singing the name Thomasina over and over to myself in the dark.
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BRODIE ‘Come on Thomasina,’ I wheedled, ‘what’s eating you?’ She gave me a sick smile. ‘Just work.’ Work. That’s all she ever thought about. Here I was bursting with the news that I loved her, and she was in the dumps over some crap happening at work. ‘Nothing you could talk to a clerk about, of course.’ ‘Don’t be like that Brodie.’ Her voice was all quiet and crumpled. Good one. Why couldn’t I just watch that big mouth of mine. ‘Although, it’s true in a way,’ she said, ‘I can’t really talk to you about the hospital all that much. And you were so pissed off about that stuff with Jana the other night, I certainly couldn’t mention her to you.’ 35
‘What about her?’ I was suddenly alarmed. Gerry sighed. ‘She’s in ICU …’ ‘Why? What happened?’ ‘The usual. Drug overdose. It happens all the time.’ ‘How?’ ‘Oh, they build up a stash, pretend to take their drugs, but hide them on the ward somewhere. Or get them from other patients. And then, when everything gets too much, they down the whole lot in one go.’ ‘But how?’ I was almost shouting. ‘It’s a goddamned hospital isn’t it, there are nurses and doctors and stuff, why don’t they stop them?’ ‘We do what we can,’ Gerry said tiredly, ‘but we can’t watch people twenty-four hours a day, and if they’re determined …’ ‘She won’t, she can’t, surely …’ ‘She might not make it.’ That really spun me out. I mean, Jana was crazy and all that, but shit, she couldn’t just pull that Fenna crap, turn my brain to mush and then die on me. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing to you,’ Gerry said, in a hopeless sort of way that tore holes in my innards. ‘It’ll be just one less middle-aged fruit cake to annoy you.’ And burst into tears. I swerved to the curb in front of a silver Mercedes. The driver blasted his horn. Gerra cried like she was never going to stop. ‘Come on,’ I said handing her tissue after tissue and dabbing at her face like an idiot, ‘she won’t die. What about all this high tech stuff they’ve got 36
these days, they keep people alive for years after t h e y ’ re supposed to be dead. They’ll pull her through.’ ‘It’s not just Jana,’ Gerra said, wiping her eyes at last and snuffling into a tissue, ‘there’s a lot of other people like her. Good, kind, intelligent people who can’t think of a single reason to stay alive. Little kids even. You don’t know what it’s like, Brodie.’ Of course not, not me, Brodie McPherson, success story of the century. Never been on a downer my whole wonderful life. I didn’t say this, of course, just kept patting her and wishing there was something I could do. I’d never seen her this down. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s forget Cafe Bleu, eh? I’ve heard they don’t serve cappuccinos to people with blotchy faces anyway.’ She grinned and I felt stupidly proud I’d made her smile. ‘Why don’t you come over to the flat for a while? It’s a pit, as usual, but I could light the fire, make you some toast, and brush your hair for you or something.’ She giggled. ‘Sounds romantic.’ I got embarrassed then. ‘I know it’s not much …’ ‘It sounds great. You know what? You’re really kind, Brodie.’ I blushed, remembering how I’d been about to lay the big heavy, I love you trip on her. It seemed irrelevant now. I just wanted her not to hurt so much. To have a place to rest for a while. I threw another U-turn — know how a yo-yo feels — and 37
headed back to the flat. Brad went ape, of course. I think the mutt liked her more than he liked me. The same with her. No matter how he slobbered her and covered her clothes with dog hair, she’d just laugh and tell him he was the handsomest, c l e v e rest, most adorable cre a t u re in the whole world. And he believed her. While they were smooching over each other, I went down and got logs for the fire. I would have got the stars out of the sky for her if I could have, but it was toast I’d promised, and a fire. I cut thick slabs of bread and put the milk on for Milo. Comfort food, Mum calls it. I was ridiculously proud of myself when the sticks caught straight away and the fire began to blast out heat. I hauled the couch over and settled Gerry into the cushions. It was a great old couch, as hard to shift as a Mack truck, but really comfortable. Atlas and I just about gave ourselves hernias the day we’d dragged it up to the flat. Halfway up we’d collapsed on the landing, puffing away like steam trains. ‘We’re nuts,’ I’d said to Atlas, as I flexed my groaning shoulders. ‘Yeah man,’ he’d replied. ‘Why don’t we just leave it in the street? We could bring the box down and sit in the street in style, and watch telly with the local pissheads.’ And we’d laughed ourselves silly. Eventually we got it the rest of the way up, and shoved it into the living room. It took up a good chunk of the floor space, and was always buried in newspapers, 38
TV guides, windcheaters and other junk, but we loved it. So did Brad. I told Gerry a few stories about my exciting life in Debt Management while we ate our toast and when she’d finished I licked each of her buttery fingers. She liked that. ‘Now, just stay there,’ I told her, ‘while I get my hairbrush.’ Gerry had the most beautiful hair; thick, dark, sleek as a panther’s, and just about her favourite thing was having it brushed. I loved the heavy smooth feel of her hair as I drew the br u s h through it. I made each stroke as long and as even as I could. ‘That feels so good, Brodie.’ I felt like king pin. I worked away till she dropped off to sleep, soothed by the warmth of the f i re and the rhythm of the brushing. I got my doona then, and tucked it around her. And to stop Atlas blundering in like a stampeding buffalo I blutacked a note to the front door: Quiet, moron! Wake Gerry and I’ll vaporise you! Signed Brodie, Terminator! By eleven o’clock Atlas still wasn’t home, and Gerry hadn’t woken. I read computer magazines for a while — didn’t want to put the TV on in case it woke her — made myself a sandwich and a cup of coffee and then just stared into the flames. A million feelings I couldn’t put names to jostled about in my body, a million thoughts raced through my head. I thought about loving Gerry, about what a nerd I’d been, about work, about Mum and Dad, and finally, about Jana in intensive 39
care. Would she really die? What did it mean to die, anyway? In spite of everything, I couldn’t imagine getting desperate enough to kill myself. Or was that just because I finally had something to hope for? And why, I thought for the millionth time, did it matter to me that Jana thought I was someone else? Why had it sent shivers through me when she yelled ‘Fenna!’ across the room? As I sat there watching the dancing shadows of the firelight on the walls and ceiling, one of those weird arguments that you sometimes have with yourself started. You know the way you can split your mind into two parts, like you do when you play left hand against right in checkers or something. Well, you are aren’t you? Are what? Somebody else. Oh yeah? The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat sort of stuff? Want me to spell it out for you, Mr Bro d i e McPherson? So I’m not their kid. But it’s their name. Okay, I take your point, I am somebody else. But not this Fenna dude. How do you know? She might have some long lost kid or something. It happens. The argument was cut short by the sound of feet thumping up the stairs and something heavy being heaved against the door. The latch rattled and the door was shoved open. It was Atlas, bal40
ancing a slab of stubbies on his knee. Brad opened one eye, then closed it again. ‘What’s the matter, cretin,’ I hissed at him, ‘Can’t you read?’ Gerry woke up then, with all the row. ‘G’day Gerry,’ Atlas said, ‘Brodie keeping you outa bed?’ Gerry looked up at the digital on the mantelpiece in a dazed sort of way. ‘Brodie, it’s after twelve! I’ve been asleep for hours!’ ‘I know how it is,’ Atlas said, ‘he puts me to sleep every night with his in-depth discussions of world affairs.’ Gerry climbed out from under the doona, smoothed down her crumpled uniform and looked around for her shoes. Brad bounced off the couch and started rushing about madly and I stood there like a dork, wanting her to stay, but not daring to ask. Something weird happened then. Atlas was at the fridge, piling the stubbies in. Suddenly he slammed the fridge door shut, d ropped the rest of the slab on the table and walked out of the room. ‘I’m crashing,’ he called from the hall. ‘Catch you Gerry, see you in the morning Brodie.’ Normally he’d sit around talking for hours and we’d knock back a few, or share a bong, especially when Gerry was there. ‘Don’t go,’ I said then, catching Gerry’s hand. She looked at me dubiously. ‘Please stay.’ ‘Brodie …’ 41
‘It’s all right, I can sleep on the couch if you like.’ She laughed. ‘You don’t have to do that.’ ‘Then you’ll stay?’ ‘Yes. Only, don’t expect anything will you?’ I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I was just glad she was staying. ‘And which half of the pyjamas would madam care for?’ I said in a goofy voice, hoping she’d get the message that I wasn’t going to heavy her. I hadn’t worn pyjamas for years, but thanks to good old Mum and her you-never-know-whenyou-might-have-to-go-to-hospital-suddenly philosophy there was a brand new pair, still in the packet, in one of my drawers. I hauled them out and handed them over, and while Gerry was in the bathroom I gathered up all the stuff lying round the floor and chucked it into the wardrobe. Then I straightened up the bed, glad the sheets were reasonably clean. Brad was snoring on the couch when I went back into the living room to get my doona. I switched off the light and left him to it. I could hear the shower running, then sudden silence. No sound from Atlas’s room. I was keyed up, edgy, as though it were the first time I’d had a girl in my bed. Gerry’d slept at the flat before, and a few times we’d made love, but she hadn’t seemed all that impressed. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t quite how they showed it on the movies, so we usually ended up just kissing and cuddling. I was no better at sex than at anything else. I must admit I felt horny at the thought of Gerry 42
in my bed, but some other feeling was there too. Something that had made me content just to sit next to her for hours and watch her sleep without wanting anything back. I’d stopped worrying about my own pathetic life, it was Gerry I wanted to fix everything for. To make the world all safe and right for her, so she’d never be tired or miserable again. The old knight in shining armour bullshit, but that’s how it was. She looked cute in my pyjamas, and a bit shy too, which surprised me. ‘Help yourself,’ I said, pointing to the bed. I t h rew myself under the shower and scr u b b e d away then brushed my teeth till the gums bled. My feet were damp as I padded back to the bedroom. I switched off the light and slid in under the doona. Gerry sighed and snuggled against me and I put an arm around her, carefully. You wouldn’t believe how good she felt, her back curved against my chest, her hair soft and sweet on my throat. I liked this girl so much. No, loved her. Perhaps everything’d come right after all. ‘Brodie.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Would you do something for me?’ Would I? ‘Sure,’ I said, trying to sound casual, ‘like what?’ She rearranged herself, burying her face in my chest, so that when she spoke I could feel the muffled words like little ripples on my skin. ‘I know you think I don’t think about anything but the hospital …’ 43
‘Well, you must admit you’re fairly full on,’ I teased her. ‘I care a lot about the patients, you know.’ ‘I know, and I love you for it, even though I give you a hard time.’ She sat up then and looked at me for a while, as if she were trying to decide what to say next. A little line appeared between her eyes like it always did when she was trying to nut something out. I tried to get my mind in gear but I was more interested in the way her breasts lifted the soft cotton of the pyjama jacket and the candle made little puddles of light in her dark hair. She went on a bit about the w a rd and the patients. I tried to keep my face blank, but inside I started to fume. Bloody shop talk, when what I wanted was to throw myself at her feet and say I love you! For god’s sake, I’d finally realised I loved her and all she wanted was to talk about a bunch of losers in the vegie ward! Cool it, a harsh voice inside my head sneered. You want a chance with this chick, you better watch your face! The cynical words sickened me, and the feeling of goodness, wholeness, vanished. Love! the voice continued, don’t kid yourself. Admit it, you want to crack onto this chick. Gerry was pretty intent on what she was telling me. ‘I talked with Jana when she regained consciousness.’ ‘Think she’ll make it?’ Funny how the thought of Jana dying, which only a few hours earlier had me really freaked out, no longer seemed real. Loving Gerry held the promise of everything, made it somehow impossible for anyone to die. 44
‘Probably. This time anyway.’ Her voice was bitter. I tried to re a s s u re her. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’ ‘But I do, in a way …’ ‘Bullshit Gerry, you’re not responsible for every fruitcake who decides to suicide!’ ‘I know that, but this is a bit different.’ ‘How?’ ‘It was because of me that she met you.’ ‘So?’ I must have come across a bit aggr o , because she took a while to answer and began to choose her words carefully. ‘Brodie, you must understand how desperate some of these people are.’ Tell me about it! ‘And Jana has this idea in her mind …’ ‘That I’m some sort of a bosom buddy of hers called Fenna.’ In spite of herself, Gerry grinned. ‘Well yes. And that the two of you had some sort of agreement, something about holding onto memories, and you’ve broken that agreement, betrayed her in some way.’ Gerry put her hand on mine, to stop the protests I was about to make. ‘I know it’s paranoid, but I thought …’ I knew what she was going to ask. And she did. No way! was my first reaction, even though I’d decided off my own bat earlier to go and see Jana. Gerry didn’t press me for an answer, just waited quietly while I fought with myself. It’s weird, I started to get the feeling that she knew something 45
I didn’t. The silence grew. I know this is going to sound off-the-show, but it started to have a sort of holy feeling. I don’t know if that is the right word — sort of hushed, you know, like when the moon rises all big and orange on a frosty night, or when you see glow worms shining out of a fern bank in the forest, and it is so magic it makes you go all clean and quiet inside. Because it’s real. Like Gerry’s goodness. I know ‘goodness’ is a wimpy sort of Sunday School word, but I mean the way she just got in there and helped people. Got involved. She wasn’t hollow inside, or scared, like me. She was solid. Real. And sometimes, when I was with her it seemed possible I might be, too. ‘Okay,’ I said, after what seemed like a year. ‘No sweat. I’ll go and talk to the old bat.’ Gerry burst into tears. That threw me a bit, so I just sat there for a while and dabbed at her wet face with the doona cover, and blew little fish kisses into her ears. ‘You’re good, Brodie,’ she said. That startled me: it was what I’d been thinking about her. If you knew what I was really like, I thought. But it was nice hearing her say it anyway. We cuddled for a while after that, then Gerry fell asleep. I lay awake, wondering what I’d let myself in for. Oh well, I’d know soon enough. For the time being it was good to be warm and close. I wondered when I’d get round to telling her I loved her. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with words at all. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I was so stoked, but I dropped off in the end. 46
It was one of those restless nights, awakeasleep, where you’re so conscious of the person lying beside you, and you’re not sure what’s real and what’s a dream. But, when I opened my eyes just before dawn and saw Gerry there beside me, I knew what was real. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t thinking about all the shit that’d been on my mind for ever, I just saw Gerry and got all quiet and stirred, wild and sexy, still and restless at the same time. There was no way I could lie there and not touch her. I reached over with one hand and started to stroke her hair, gently. She didn’t stir, so I moved my hand to her shoulder, down her back, across her hips and onto her belly. She stirred then, and without opening her eyes turned and folded her body into mine. And when I put my arms around her, I swear I was holding the whole world. Perhaps I was. We called each other’s names, again and again, and then I said it, out loud, I love you, and my heart exploded into eight million shining pieces. I’d waited my whole life to find that place where searching stops. To know whether it really existed. And now I knew. It did. It was real. Rushing round getting ready for work, so that I could get Gerry home to get a clean uniform and then to the hospital on time, I started to freak out. It’s a bad habit of mine that when something good comes my way I start to turn it over and over in my mind, looking for the catch. What if she’d guessed I’d already planned to see Jana, would she still have said I was good? What if she thought I’d only said yes so that she’d let me make love to 47
her? I tried this last ‘what if’ out on her in the car, but she only laughed. ‘And what if? What are you going to do about it? Ask for your money back?’ So I laughed too. ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and if you want to know, it has got something to do with your saying you’d see Jana. But not the way you think.’ I must have looked as if I didn’t believe her because she laughed again, and said she’d thought she was going to have to wait till we were old age pensioners before I twigged I loved her. ‘You mean you knew?’ ‘Of course, retard, but there wasn’t much point till you knew, was there?’ I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. ‘So, in a way you should be grateful to Jana. Mind you, we’ve only known her about five minutes, and we’ve known each other most of our lives. So is it so weird that we got it together eventually?’ ‘Gerra, I gotta tell you, I already decided to go and see Jana. On my own, before you asked me, before I knew she was in ICU.’ Gerry laughed again. Nothing fazed her. ‘Enlightened self-interest the therapists call it. Better than being a do-gooder, like me.’ There didn’t seem to be a lot to say after that. Even I couldn’t think of any more dramas to whip up so I turned on the radio and we sang along to the corny golden oldies, holding hands and laughing ourselves silly all the way to her house, then to the hospital. 48
‘I’ll ring you at lunchtime,’ she said as she climbed out of the car, ‘let you know what I can arrange with ICU for you, about Jana.’ ‘Okay.’ We kissed and I didn’t want to let her go. Wanted to hold her and tell her again and again that I loved her. Wanted to talk about what sort of house we’d build, how many kids we’d have, whether we’d live in the country, that sort of stuff. Wanted to turn the car round and take her back to the flat, back to my bed and stay there for days, weeks, months. It was hard to just leave her there and head off to work. I blew her one last kiss as she disappeared into the hospital. Now get on with it, I told myself, this is just the beginning; you’ve got a whole lifetime together.
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BRODIE Hospitals are the pits. You just can’t believe all those gadgets, flashing and blipping and clicking away like crazy. It’d be enough to make you die of fright to wake up and find yourself wired up to all that gear. Although I suppose if you’d had a heart attack or something you wouldn’t care how many machines they hooked you up to. I don’t know how Gerry managed to get me in. ICU at Mordland General is like a maximum security gaol, but when Gerry wanted something, she usually made sure it happened. Perhaps she told them I was a long lost relative. Freaky. I tried not to look at the machines, or the bottles hanging round the bed, in case I lost it totally. Gerry was cool, she saw this sort of shit all the time, but it wasn’t my scene. Jana was out of it, completely. I hated the grey, 50
s h runken look of her, the weird way she was b reathing; the tubes running everywhere. She didn’t look a bit like the boss-woman who’d been raving at me a few days earlier. Gerry spoke softly to her but Jana didn’t move or open her eyes. ‘Jana.’ Still no response. Perhaps she was already dead and it was only the machines keeping her heart going. Gerry took her hand. ‘Jana, it’s me, Geraldine.’ The limp hand moved slightly. There was a person in there somewhere still. Gerry spoke slowly and clearly, as though Jana didn’t understand English or as if she were a long way away. ‘Jana, listen. I’ve brought someone to see you. Do you want to say hello to him?’ About a hundred years went by till slowly and painfully like she was trying to lift Uluru, Jana cranked her eyelids open. She gave Gerra a bit of a smile. Then she saw me. ‘Hello.’ Big speech, but how were you supposed to handle this sort of scene anyway? She stared at me for ages as if she was trying to work out where she’d seen me, then tears started leaking out of her eyes and running down the sides of her face onto the pillow. Don’t! I wanted to yell. I’d rather she ranted and raved than lie there with tears dripping into her ears. What should I do now? If it’d been Gerry lying there I’d have thought of something. Should I say I was Fenna? At least then she’d die happy. And if she didn’t die would I have to spend the rest of my life playing some weird game of make believe 51
with her, pretending to be someone who existed only inside her pickled brain? I wondered where she’d got this Fenna dude from. She turned her head then and stared at me in the spookiest way, as if she could hear what I was thinking. I started to sweat, tried to look away but couldn’t. She had some hold over me, she could squeeze my mind and force words that I didn’t know were there out of me. ‘You were right, Jana, the Memories have been taken from me,’ I heard myself saying. It was like something had taken over my brain and I couldn’t control what I was saying. I’d heard about automatic writing, where people got messages from the spirit world. Was this automatic speaking? Jana made no sign she’d heard, just lay there waiting. It was pretty freaky. I was speaking lines from some damn play I’d never read. There was a lump in my throat the size of a football. The words forced themselves past it. ‘Will you help me get the Memories back?’ She nodded then sighed and closed her eyes as if that’d been what she was waiting for. One of those bossy sisters rushed over then, the sort that think they own the place, and the only reason you are there is to upset their patients and trash the hospital. She hustled us out. Gerry rang me at work late in the afternoon to tell me Jana was going to be okay, and that she was proud of me. I felt a bit of a fraud. It’d been as much for myself and Gerry as for the old chook that I’d agreed to the visit. I felt weird about what I’d said to Jana and was a bit worried Gerry’d stir 52
me about it, but she didn’t. She just said that Jana had asked to see me again. ‘How do you feel about that?’ Gerry said. ‘Yeah well …’ ‘She’s really something, the old Jana, when you get to know her, you’d be surprised.’ ‘It’s all very well for you. She doesn’t think you’re something out of a Masters of the Universe movie!’ Gerry giggled. ‘Keeper of the Memories, transformed into a Taxation Department lackey by the evil spell of the wicked alien.’ ‘Exactly! And only the kiss of the beautiful princess with the name of a cat, or is it a mouse, can save him from his cruel fate? So how about it Ms Princess? Got any spare kisses?’ She giggled again. ‘I might. Perhaps if you come to the castle door by moonlight …’ ‘Is that an invitation?’ ‘And what about my maidenly modesty?’ she teased. ‘I think I can take care of that.’ It was at this point I noticed Shep earwigging on us. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he smirked. ‘It takes more than a little kissy-poo talk to upset me.’ I was about to spit it but then I laughed. What did it matter who heard? I rolled my eyes. ‘You know how love affects the brain.’ He laughed too, in a friendly sort of way. Hell, at this rate I’d be friends with the whole world if I didn’t watch it. Why not? When you’d been lost in 53
some endless desert forever, and suddenly you found the way out you felt you could love anything, or anybody. Even the stuff with Jana, which could turn into a full-on drama, didn’t seem so freaky now. I’d figure it out somehow. And make it up to Mum for upsetting her with all that adoption stuff. What did it matter who I was or where I came from. I loved Gerry and she loved me. I wasn’t a dried out old sponge any more. I could be bothere d again, and that all added up to a whole lot. The next few months were unreal. I’d rush off after work every day to pick Gerry up from the hospital. We’d go for coffee then back to the flat to get Brad and out along the coast road to one of the beach tracks. I’ve always loved the beach in winter. It’s cold and the wind cuts like a knife, but the crash and bluster of the waves and the salt spray tangling your hair makes you high as a kite. And here, winter lasted long after the calender told you it was supposed to be spring. We’d jam on our beanies and set off, Brad rushing ahead to bark at seagulls, then dashing back and circling us till we were dizzy. We must’ve walked miles, and talked about nearly everything you could name. We’d always been close, but now it seemed as if we had a lifetime of talking to catch up on. Having found ourselves at the centre of the universe, we wanted to show each other the paths we’d arrived b y. To take our separate stories and join them, offering everything that we were to each other, so that we could weave our lives together, forever. 54
And when we weren’t talking flat chat, we played like little kids, skimming stones on the waves, collecting shells, draping each other ’ s blueys with smelly strands of bladderwrack. We’d rush along the water line, squealing and laughing as the water reached the tips of our boots, and then we’d fall backwards onto the cold soft sand and laugh our heads off. I’d never seen Gerry so beautiful: high, radiant, a rainbow cr e a t u re , spanning the skies. I felt pretty spot on, myself. The old Gerry didn’t completely disappear though. She stirred me about how long it’d taken me to catch on that I loved her. ‘I was planning to propose to you on your fortieth birthday, if you hadn’t twigged,’ she laughed, one evening when the moon was riding high on ragged clouds and the wind-driven sand stung our faces. I pretended to pout. ‘Twenty-one years’d be a long time to wait.’ ‘Who says I would’ve waited?’ she re t o r t e d , ducking away to pick up the stick Brad dropped a few feet away. She hurled it along the water line for him. The wind scattered her words to the sand dunes behind, but I caught them and hugged them inside me, warm and glowing. Suddenly, watching Gerra rush after Brad, I thought, why not? If we were going to spend the rest of our lives together we ought to get started straight away. ‘Gerra!’ I hollered. ‘Hey, Gerra, wait!’ She turned and waved, then dashed off with Brad again. I caught up with her eventually and 55
pulled her into my arms, turning our backs to the wind so I wouldn’t have to yell. ‘Let’s get married,’ I said, nuzzling her neck. ‘Now. Straight away.’ She said nothing for a while. I hardly dare d breathe. Then she gave me one of her cheekiest grins. ‘All right, but not before we get a pizza. I’m starved.’ I laughed. ‘So am I. Let’s go.’ As we ran back to the car, hand in hand, I told myself, it doesn’t come better than this, kiddo. No way. I kept my promise to visit Jana. I’d have done anything for Gerry. But it wasn’t just for Gerry, I had to admit. In some strange way I’d almost started to think of this Fenna dude as real, and begun to wonder whether he thought he w a s B rodie McPherson. Whatever the reason, I just wasn’t so freaked out about it all anymore. Being in love really mellowed me out. It wasn’t such a big deal to let Jana think I was whoever she wanted me to be, if it made her happy. It’s hard to tell the next bit. Not just that it’s been jumbled in my brain till now, so that I’m not sure I’ve got it all straight, but because if I tell it I’ll live it all over again, which is just about unbearable. Gerry rang me at work just before five one day, to remind me of my appointment with Jana the next day. ‘She asked me today when you were coming.’ ‘It’s cool, I hadn’t forgotten.’ I hadn’t, but I’d pushed it to the back of my 56
mind, what with everything else that had happened. Did being in love, being happy, make you selfish, I wondered? Was it only when you yourself had suff e red that you were able think about other people? That’s the sort of stuff it’d take someone much brainier than me to work out. ‘Well, she’s back on Third East now, so it’d be great if you’d drop in.’ ‘For sure. Now what time will I pick you up tonight?’ ‘Oh Brodie, that’s what I wanted to tell you, I’ll be late tonight. We’re flat out …’ ‘That’s okay,’ I said quickly, hoping I didn’t sound too cut. I hated that hospital of hers, I told h e r, and I was only half joking. I hated every minute we had to spend away from each other. ‘Don’t be like that, Brodie,’ she said quietly. ‘You know what my work means to me.’ I said sorry, that it was about time I dropped in on Mum and Dad anyway. I’d go and have tea with them and she could ring when she was ready for me to pick her up. ‘Thanks Brodie.’ She sounded relieved. And worried. ‘Not another effort like Jana I hope?’ ‘No, thank goodness, though just as traumatic for the patient concerned. Relatives coming from Melbourne and that could mean major hassles. I told Sister I’d stay till they get here.’ ‘Thomasina saves the world. I guess I’ll just have to get used to it.’ ‘I love you too, Brodie McPherson,’ she whispered in her sexiest voice. 57
My knees started to buckle. ‘Hey, you don’t play fair.’ ‘Why should I?’ she whispered, her voice like treacle. ‘But I’m at work.’ She laughed. ‘So am I.’ People were milling around as I stood there grinning into the phone. A walking cliché, love on a stick, drifting somewhere out in the stratosphere and couldn’t have cared less. ‘Don’t be too long will you?’ ‘Good,’ she said, suddenly returning to her own voice, ‘I’ll get on to that straight away.’ Someone must have come into the nurses’ station. ‘And perhaps it would be best if the matter was discussed with the parents.’ Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘You’re a nut!’ ‘Really?’ she said, primly, keeping up the charade. ‘Oh Gerra, it’s going to be the best! I promise. You and me together, forever!’ I rang Mum. She was over the moon that I was coming for tea. ‘It’s nothing special though, B rodie. Only corn beef and carrots. I’d have cooked a roast if I’d known.’ ‘Mum, you know you don’t have to go to any trouble.’ She was indignant. ‘You call cooking tea for my son trouble? I don’t see enough of you as it is.’ That again. I could hardly say, it’s your own fault: you won’t let me breathe, and the old man is a pain in the arse. ‘Mum, it won’t be a long visit I have to pick 58
Gerry up at the hospital about eight, okay?’ ‘Oh, I know you young people are busy,’ she said. ‘Your father will be as pleased as punch to see you.’ I seriously doubted that, but I kept my mouth shut. ‘Okay then Mum, catch you in a while.’ ‘Bye dear, and you drive carefully, won’t you? The traffic’s dreadful this time of night and I worry about you in that car of yours.’ Did she have a premonition? Looking back, you can see signs everywhere. Your mind goes haywire with that ‘why didn’t I see it coming?’ sort of shit. The thing is you didn’t, and that’s all t h e re is to it. You went full bore ahead, and it wouldn’t have mattered if the whole world had known there was a brick wall in front of you, you were the one that had to find out the hard way. I drove over to the folks’. It was the same as always, Mum fussing over me and Dad cro s s examining me about work, money, my plans for the future. Man to man, you know, and with plenty of heavy advice thrown in. I felt like shouting, but I was so relaxed out by the thought of the night ahead, and so off my brain with relief that I’d turned out to be not such a lousy lover after all, that I managed to keep my sarc a s t i c comments to myself. ‘The garden’s looking good,’ Mum said at last. ‘Why don’t you take Brodie out to see it, Kevin dear?’ She’d been trying to get the tea while the old man quizzed me and the kitchen’s not that big anyway. She probably wanted us both out of her 59
hair for a bit, while she set the table and made the parsley sauce. Dad and I went out the back. I must admit he’s an ace gardener. Everything staked and weeded and healthy looking. He cut me a lettuce and some broccoli, then went into the hot house for the last of the tomatoes. The little old hot house has been there as long as I can remember: Dad practically lives there in the winter and spring, and it’s about the one place he’s halfway human. He’ll talk for ages about the seedlings he’s raising and other stuff too, if you’ll listen. Maybe the light and the warmth in there mellows him out. ‘Not much left now,’ he called back to me, ‘but it’s been a good season.’ I managed a few non-aggro comments, about the garden and stuff like that, then Mum called us in for tea. It was a good feeling, looking up past the darkening garden beds to where she was standing framed in light at the back door, with the kitchen windows all misted up from cooking. We didn’t waste any time getting in there. ‘It’s good to see Brodie eating well, isn’t it?’ Mum said to Dad, as I demolished my second helping of rice pudding. ‘He’s been looking a bit peaky lately, don’t you think?’ She was at the sink already, running the hot water as she pulled on her rubber gloves. Dad pushed back his chair and pulled open one of the dresser drawers. ‘Probably burning the candle at both ends,’ he m u t t e red, fossicking around in the drawer. He found what he was looking for, and went back to the table, burying his nose in his seed catalogue, going hmm to himself every now and again and 60
marking a tick here and there with a stub of a pencil. Pity I wasn’t one of his precious tomato plants. Then he’d find something good to say about me. One day I’d tell Mum exactly why I’d left home. ‘And how is Geraldine?’ Mum asked. She’d finished the washing up and was fussing about putting away the table mats and stuff while the kettle boiled. I’d offered to help, but she’d said no, I’d been at work all day and should relax. I smiled to myself and thought, enjoy it while you can lad, that certainly won’t be the deal with Gerry! ‘Is she still enjoying the nursing?’ I nodded. ‘She’s on the psych ward at the moment. Oh, and I forgot, she sends her love.’ ‘Such a nice girl,’ Mum said. ‘Always so friendly and so high spirited.’ Dad looked up and grunted. ‘Flighty, more like it. But you always did look at the world through rose-coloured glasses, Marjorie.’ Same old shit, Mum busting a gut to be nice, Dad bad-mouthing everything, and me stuck in the middle, usually making things worse. Like I did then. ‘What would you know about it?’ I snapped. I should have kept my mouth shut. He raved for about an hour then, while Mum poured the tea and washed up the cups after we’d finished. All his favourite topics: the lack of respect of the youth of today; the way they demanded adult privileges but refused to accept adult responsibilities; how they thought the older generation had nothing to teach them, but were quick enough to 61
come crying if they needed bailing out of situations they couldn’t handle. I’d heard it a hundred times, and it always got me really cut. I suppose I’d never tried to see it from his side. Never actually thought what it must be like to watch your kid grow up, and not turn out the way you wanted. All I could think of was getting back at him. That’s how I came to drop the bombshell. ‘Well, we might be disrespectful and immature, but that’s not going to stop us getting married.’ I hadn’t meant to tell them like that, but it certainly shut Dad up for a while. Not for long though. Mum got in first, trying to be positive as usual, although she looked a bit shell-shocked. ‘It’s a bit sudden, but then, you’ve been friends a long time, and I’m sure you’ve talked it over together.’ And she bent over the bits and pieces of cloth she was sorting for her latest quilt. ‘Not just friends, Mum, I love Gerry.’ ‘I’m sure you do dear,’ she said quietly, smoothing out a piece of flowered yellow cloth and placing the quilting stencil on it, ‘and I’m very happy for you both.’ ‘Love!’ Dad spluttered, slamming his seed catalogue down on the table so hard that bits of Mum’s quilt cloth fluttered about. ‘What would a pair of whippersnappers like you two know about love? You’re hardly out of nappies.’ ‘Nineteen, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ Mum gathered the scattered bits into a little pile, quickly and quietly. ‘Nineteen!’ he bellowed. ‘What’s nineteen? Life’s no kid’s game, and love’s not the way you 62
see it on the soap operas. There are serious responsibilities to face up to in adult life.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ Mum looked from one to the other of us, then got up quietly and left the room. ‘To start with,’ Dad said, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘how do you intend to keep this girl, this wife of yours?’ ‘None of your goddamned business! Anyway we both work, so what’s the big deal?’ ‘A base grade clerk and a student nurse. Hmm.’ Mum came back in with her quilting pattern book. She brushed my shoulder as she went back to her place. ‘Now Kevin, I’m sure Geraldine and Bro d i e know what they’re doing.’ ‘It hadn’t occurred to you,’ he went on, as if Mum hadn’t spoken, ‘to wait till you had something solid behind you before embarking on married life? It’s not a game, you know.’ ‘So you keep telling me!’ ‘Brodie, your father only means to …’ ‘It’s got nothing to do with him,’ I muttered, staring down at the lino. Dark blue squares inside larger pale blue squares. They made you dizzy if you stared at them long enough. ‘We only want what’s best for you,’ Mum was saying, as I dragged my mind out of the Escher puzzle of the kitchen floor. ‘And if your father seems a little critical, it’s just that he wants you to be sure you’ve thought it all out thoroughly.’ ‘A little? According to him, I wouldn’t know my arse from my elbow!’ 63
‘There’s no call for that sort of language, young man,’ Dad snarled. ‘It seems to me that a person who can’t control his tongue is hardly grown up enough to be considering getting married.’ He got up and pushed his chair in, in that precise way he has. Putting the legs exactly in line with the edges of the squares on the lino. It drives me crazy the way he does that. ‘And what’s it to you?’ I yelled. ‘It’s none of your business anyway!’ ‘That’s just where you’re wrong, young man, and if you think …’ Mum again, trying to smooth things over. ‘Your father only wants what’s best for you dear.’ That did it. One time too many! The thing I swore I’d never say, no matter how bad things got between us, burst out, ‘He’s not my father!’ F reeze frame on the kitchen. Mum with her hand over her mouth looking as if she were going to burst into tears. Me, red-faced and angry, and Dad, still as a corpse. The tap dripping; their stupid Blue Mountains souvenir clock ticking away; the light and dark blue squares of the lino dancing together crazily. Dad’s chair standing to attention, the other chairs pushed out from the table. The silence went on forever. Finally Mum got up to see to the tap and Dad turned to me, g rey-faced and trembling. His fingers started drumming the edge of the table. ‘Don’t think I haven’t seen this coming.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His voice took on a bitter note. ‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Son.’ 64
Mum reached out and took his hand, whether to comfort him or to try to shut him up, I don’t know. He kept on anyway. ‘That stuff you were upsetting your mother with the other day, all that carry on about what happened before we got you, I see what your game is now …’ The phone rang in the sun room. We all jumped. ‘I’ll get it, ‘ I said, pushing open the glass doors. ‘It’ll be Gerry.’ It was. ‘You’re early.’ She laughed. ‘Are you complaining?’ ‘So it went okay then?’ I was conscious of Mum and Dad in the kitchen. ‘With the parents, I mean. Of the head case, the-er-patient.’ ‘Much better than we thought. That’s why I could get away earlier. But if you want to have more time with your parents, I could get a taxi over.’ ‘No!’ ‘ B rodie you sound weird. Is there anything wrong?’ ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes, right?’ ‘Brodie?’ I put the phone down and went back into the kitchen. They were still standing there. I pushed my chair in. The vegetables that Dad had given me were on the dresser. I left them there. ‘That was Gerry,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘She’s waiting. I gotta go. Thanks for the tea, Mum. Catch you, Dad. I’m off to mug a few pensioners, do a few drug deals. Write to me in gaol.’ I burned rubber all the way, screeched into the 65
hospital grounds, and took off almost before Gerry was in the car. And that was how the dream ended. I remember burning down Harrington Str e e t , giving Gerry an earful of the mega-row I’d had with Dad. I remember ranting and raving about how I’d like to beat the shit out of him and I remember her screaming as the car skidded and turned over and over, like a leaf in the wind. I don’t remember landing. Just the feeling of falling in slo-mo down a dark tunnel, with the air so icy it scorched my lungs. And then — stillness. Like we were in some sort of cave, under the earth, with everything collapsed in on us and no way out. I remember thinking, so this is how it all ends.
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5
BRODIE Footsteps. Clattering and clanging. Sharp astringent smells. Glaring lights. Voices. One voice emerging from the babble. A woman’s. ‘I’m sorry. The patient is in no condition to answer questions.’ A man’s voice. Rougher. Deeper. ‘May be criminal charges laid …’ The woman’s voice again. ‘The patient has not regained consciousness yet …’ ‘… earliest possible … you understand it’s vital that we speak with him as soon …’ ‘… patient’s welfare is our first concern …’ The woman’s voice moving away, fading. Then a face, distorted, like in a fun park mirror. Close to my face. Too close. And the gruff voice in my ear, ‘I don’t know if you can hear me, sonny Jim, but make no mistake, we’re gunna throw the book at you!’ 67
Mum, twisting her handkerchief round and round her fingers. And Dad, for god’s sake, crying. Patting my shoulder. It hurt. ‘Don’t worry son, we’ll stand by you, no matter what.’ ‘Sure Dad.’ My mouth swollen, my jaw stiff, my tongue not working properly. I wished everyone’d piss off and let me sleep. I was tired and I couldn’t get comfortable on this bed. It was high and narrow and as hard as a rock. Another voice. A woman’s, saying something about a passenger, then Mum, giving Gerry’s name and address. ‘Mum, what happened?’ Dad answering. ‘You’ve been in a car accident son and Gerry was hurt. Badly.’ Dad having trouble speaking, his voice coming in queer little spurts. ‘You crashed your car. There was another car. The driver is in a bad way.’ ‘What about Gerry? Where is she?’ ‘I’m sorry Brodie …’ ‘What? What? Tell me, damn you!’ ‘She died on impact, Son. Without suffering.’ It seemed like the middle of the night when I woke up. This time in a wider bed with not so many lights glaring in my eyes, but feeling as if I’d been head-butted. Atlas was slumped in a chair by the bed, snoring his head off. His hair looked like a thousand volts had gone through it. ‘Atlas,’ I croaked. He woke straight away. 68
‘Hey man.’ He ran his hand through his hair, making it even wilder. I licked my dry lips. ‘Mum? Dad? Were they here?’ ‘They went home. Doctors told ’em to. They were pooped. Didn’t want to, your Mum especially, but I said I’d stay so they could crash out for a while.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Hey, no sweat. It was housework, or staying here.’ I tried to crack a smile, but my face felt like it was busted in half. ‘What’s the score?’ His face went the colour of raw pizza dough. ‘Do you remember anything at all?’ Skyrockets of pain shot through my body, shortcircuiting my brain. ‘Gerry?’ ‘You pranged the car. She didn’t make it.’ ‘Arsehole!’ I yelled. ‘What sort of sick joke’s that? Let me out of this bed and I’ll deck you!’ But when I saw Atlas’s face hanging in the air, like one of those zombie masks, I knew he’d told me the truth. Gerry was dead. They said I was in shock. No wonder, when you’re the cause of something that bad. You don’t need a judge and jury to convict you, there’s one right there inside. Voices in your head, screaming, raging, telling you that you had no right to be alive when you’d just killed the best, the most wonderful girl in the world. That you’re the one that should be dead, not her. It was during those days in hospital, I think, that I let go of my life. Gave it over to the voices. 69
They had a field day. Tormented me with the stupid promises I’d made to Gerry. Mocked me with my kiddy dreams of doing something brave and glorious. Showed me everything gross in the world, and told me that I was all of that, and then some. That was on the inside. On the outside, doctors, reporters, police. Friends and family, awkward and shamefaced. Then Gerry’s funeral. It was the last thing, the only way left to show I loved her. To try to say sorry. ‘ A re you sure you’re well enough, Bro d i e ? ’ Mum asked anxiously. ‘Your father and I are more than happy to go on your behalf, you know that.’ I shook my head. I needed to suffer. It was a sleety, cold day. I hoped I’d get pneumonia. It was gross. A priest who’d never met Gerry dribbling on, terrible muzak playing and the coffin sitting on a sort of stage in front of a gold curtain, as if we were waiting for the movies to start. And it was over so fast. When it was time to go over to Gerry’s family, Dad took my arm. ‘Come on, Son,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s not easy, but it’s got to be done.’ What was there to say? That I loved Gerry. That I wished I could roll the film back. That I’d planned to take care of her, keep her safe forever and ever. I just said the usual dumb things you say when there are no words. But with Gerry’s little sisters, Tara and Annabelle I was able to be a bit more real. ‘I don’t want Gerry to be dead!’ Annabelle wailed. 70
‘I don’t either,’ I sobbed. ‘Believe me, Bella, neither do I.’ ‘But it’s your fault,’ Tara piped up, with that straight-shooting honesty that little kids have. ‘Mummy said it is.’ I nodded. ‘And now you can’t even say sorry.’ The three of us cried together. Two days later was the funeral of the driver of the other car. The old lady had some sort of heart attack and lost control of the car, so officially I was not responsible for her death. It was a real funeral this time, with prayers and hymns that people knew the words to. ‘A woman full of years,’ the priest said, ‘and a life of service to others, for its three score years and ten, and beyond.’ Same as Gerry, the service to others bit, but not the three score years and ten. Whose fault is that? the voices screamed. The old man, Mrs Spencer’s husband, shook hands with Mum and Dad and me and thanked us for coming. ‘No one knows God’s mysterious ways. We can only trust and let His plan for our lives unfold.’ Perhaps it was different if you really believed that stuff, if you were old, and had enough memories, or if you really thought it was God who planned this sort of shit. Who are you trying to kid? the voices snarled. You murdered his wife even if he’s too stupid and gullible to know it. Same as you murdered Gerry. And you’ll pay for it the rest of your life. 71
The din of the voices just about drove me nuts. My head was splitting apart, my bones ached. I just wanted to lie down in the dark on my own and not think or feel any more. It was a relief when the lights went out, and I could just lie there in the dark, and let the tears come. Shuffling noises in the corridor, people going to and from the toilet, and every now and again a nurse whisking by. So when another set of shuffling feet stopped outside my door, I took no notice. Some old geriatric. Nothing to do with me. Then the back of my neck started to prickle and I got the feeling that someone was staring at me. Maybe some loony with a knife, escaped from Third East. So come on, kill me, but my heart was pounding. ‘Who’s there?’ I croaked. Silence, but they were still there. In the end I turned round. It was Jana. My first impulse was to hit the bell, to get her out of there, but I did nothing. I was too tired to care any more. ‘Wanna sit down?’ I asked, finally. She shuffled to the visitor’s chair beside the bedside locker. It’s funny the way people walk in hospitals. Sort of creeping along without lifting their feet up pro p e r l y. I suppose it’d be even weirder, come to think of it, if they power-walked about the place. ‘How’d you know where to find me?’ Obvious I suppose, TV news, gossip. Jana would have asked questions when Gerry hadn’t turned up for her shift. That thought sent a strobe of pain boring through my skull. ‘Gerry. She, she’s …’ 72
Jana nodded. ‘I loved her,’ I blurted. It sounded pathetic. Like a little kid whining, it’s not my fault! ‘Loved her,’ Jana echoed, as though the words were in a language she didn’t understand. They say if you want a nightmare to end, you have to find a mirror or a pool somewhere in your dream. Something you can see your own reflection in, and look into your own eyes, and the spell will be broken. I stared into the shiny steel surface of the bedside locker, and then into the darkened window, but it didn’t work. Gerry stayed dead, so did the old woman. And I was alive and so was Jana, in spite of her efforts. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I muttered. I said a whole lot of other stuff too. Next thing, there was this light in my face. The night sister. One of those nurses who quoted the rules at you and who thought she ran your life because you happened to be lying in bed in her hospital. She really spat it when she saw Jana. Told her off for wandering around the hospital, disturbing other patients. She ought to talk! At this rate she’d have the rest of the ward awake, no worries. Jana shuffled out, while the sister pulled at bed covers, clattered charts and generally racketed about. When she got to the door, Jana looked back with a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Surely she wasn’t going to start this Fenna stuff again. ‘They haven’t taken all the Memories,’ she said, in a low voice, ‘and one day you will hear the Song Cycles again.’ Then she was off up the corridor. 73
6
BRODIE My brain went into overdrive. A monster clawed at my guts. It’s weird how physical everything turns out to be when you really get down to it. This wasn’t TV, everything fine and dandy by the time the final ads came on. It’d go on forever. Like that Greek dude, Prometheus, in that myths and legends book we had in primary school. He pissed the gods off for some reason, and they chained him to a rock and got this vulture to come and peck out his liver. And as fast as the vulture ripped it out, it grew back again, so the whole scene went on being repeated, forever. I knew just how that guy felt. I was in the middle of World War Three in my head next morning, when I sensed someone near my bed. I kept my eyes shut tight. I wasn’t up to another visit from Jana. It was Mum. She looked 74
worse than me. The doctor’d told her I’d be out soon. Had I thought what I was going to do? To change the subject I asked how Dad was. A mistake. He blamed himself. I had no idea how hard things had been for him. He was a good man at heart. Mum’d defend Dracula. If he was so good at heart why had he always poured shit on me? If it hadn’t been for him Gerra’d still be alive. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘you can’t blame your father, Brodie.’ Wanna bet? Anyway, stuff Dad, I just wished she wouldn’t sit there in that sad sort of way, letting me punch her in the guts. I wanted to blurt everything out to her. The years of tiredness and depression; the hope that’d risen so recently and been smashed again; not being able to get on with Dad; the guilt; the voices that never let up; losing Gerry; my real mum and dad getting rid of me; this business with Jana. But I couldn’t. ‘You’re a good person, Brodie,’ Mum said. ‘You always were, even as a small child. Things seem pretty bad, but remember, not one sparrow falls, without the Heavenly Father knows and cares.’ I wished I could believe that, but I couldn’t. I dozed for a while after Mum left, and in my sleep I was back in the flat with Gerry, sitting by the fire, touching her hair, kissing her. Her skin was smooth and soft and warm. I breathed its scent. She reached out for me, but when I opened my eyes it was only a nurse leaning over me, taking the thermometer out of its bracket above my bed. Why couldn’t I just die and be done with it? 75
Not so fast, the voices snarled. You just stay here and suffer. I did. A line from a Joni Mitchell song kept running through my head: you don’t know what you’ve got, till it’s gone. A million times in the next few days that song played in my head. And when I hear it on the radio now, I can smell the hospital smells again and feel the psychedelic pain rockets zapping through me. The police asked the same questions over and over again. Had I been drinking at the time of the accident? In possession of marijuana? Narc o t i c substances? Hallucinogenic drugs? What speed had I been travelling at the time of the accident? One particular cop, who’d been in casualty that night, kept calling in. He’d lean over me when the nurses weren’t around, his fists all balled up and his breath coming in little jerks. ‘Insolent young punk!’ he’d splutter, the spit shivering at the corners of his meaty lips, ‘You’ll know the score when you’re gaoled for manslaughter!’ I wouldn’t answer. Dumb insolence, Dad would call it. ‘It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, isn’t it, Brodie?’ my grandmother used to say. There’d be six million aunties and uncles and cousins all yelling at once, and only Mum and me not saying anything. I took after my mother, Gran said. It’s not that she didn’t know I was adopted, she just wanted to make me feel good. She was like that. I really missed her. You could talk to her, tell her things, without her spitting it, or telling Mum and Dad. 76
The doctors poked and prodded, tested me for this and that. Gave their verdict. Nothing was broken. I’d be up and running in no time. Up and running. Sure. One of the walking dead, like in those creepy voodoo films. Brodie McPherson, zombie, brought to you courtesy of the Mordland General. One tame murderer, ladies and gentlemen, back on his feet and ready to strike again. ‘What’s that you say man?’ It was Atlas. I’d been dribbling on out loud. I went as red as a beetroot. ‘Forget it.’ He had his board with him. ‘Come for a skate down the stairwell?’ He laughed. ‘You’re on. Hey, you allowed out of that beast?’ pointing at my chart-laden bed. ‘S’pose.’ ‘Come for a dhurrie? I know you don’t, but you look like you could use one.’ ‘Sure.’ I padded after him along miles of corridors. My head ached. I was going to chuck. I leaned on the wall and closed my eyes. ‘You okay?’ ‘Give me a minute will you.’ ‘Sure man, it’s cool.’ A scabby little mark on the wall, about waist height, looked like an apple with a lopsided stalk. I concentrated on that and waited for the floor to stop heaving. Outside on the lawn I was startled by the feel of sun on my bare arms, and the smell of salt in the air. I’d forgotten there was a world outside the hospital. A world I used to live in. I was sweating and shaking like crazy. A nurse 77
on her lunch break glanced over at me. Super-stud Atlas nodded and smiled, lit a fag. He passed it to me and lit a second. ‘Take it easy, man.’ My legs were shaking. I couldn’t focus my eyes. I sucked on the fag, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and butting quickly to hide the way my hands were shaking. ‘Brad’s okay,’ Atlas said, after we’d sat there for a while smoking. ‘Him and me are getting on just fine together.’ ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. ‘He’s a nut case. He goes berserk every time the phone rings.’ I leaned over and grabbed another death stick out of Atlas’s packet. ‘Thanks for looking after the mutt.’ ‘Forget it.’ He took a socket spanner out of his pocket and started to loosen the trucks on his board. ‘Mum and Dad could take Brad, if you like.’ He didn’t look up. ‘Nah, it’s cool.’ ‘I mean, if you want to move or anything.’ ‘Move?’ I blushed. ‘Well, I can move then.’ He ran his hand over the grip tape, which was starting to curl on the edges. He smoothed and pressed it back onto the deck. ‘Look man,’ he said. ‘There’s something I gotta say. It’s a bad scene all round, this … this …’ He s h rugged. ‘Well anyway, what I want to say is there’s no need to spit it with me. You, me, Brad, we’re a team, right?’ 78
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. ‘Besides, who else is going to clean up when I trash the place?’ I found my voice. ‘Not you, moron, that’s for sure.’ ‘Speaking of the mutt,’ he went on casually, as if we were talking about nothing in particular, ‘what if I bring him to see you?’ ‘Here, in the hospital?’ ‘Sure. Board shorts and shades and a pair of Reeboks and he’d pass for one of your cr e t i n friends, easy.’ ‘ Watch it!’ I shoved him sideways and he sprawled on the grass holding his belly and groaned. ‘Brodie Ironman totals his opponent with one flex of his mighty muscles!’ I laughed. ‘No law against quiet, well-behaved dogs on leads in public places is there?’ I laughed again. By no stretch of the imagination could you call Brad quiet or well-behaved. ‘That’d be great. Thanks.’ Just thinking about seeing that big goony Brad cheered me up. Atlas was so thick, I wondered how he’d come up with the idea. People surprise you sometimes. Other friends had come in, people f rom work, other skateboarders, guys fr o m squash, and had stood around saying nothing or talking to each other, as if I were deaf and dumb. And they’d split at the earliest possible moment. ‘See ya,’ they’d say and fall over each other to get out first. I didn’t blame them. Atlas put the sockets back in his pocket and got 79
to his feet. ‘I gotta split, Bro. Meeting a couple of the guys at the bowl. Want me to walk back to the ward with you?’ ‘No, it’s okay thanks. I think I’ll just sit here for a bit.’ ‘Sure?’ ‘Sure.’ He sauntered off across the grass and flipped his board to the footpath. Mr Cool. ‘Hey!’ I called. ‘Yo?’ ‘Thanks.’ He waved, then sped off, weaving in and out of the lunchtime crowd. He was back the next day with the mutt, as he’d promised. Brad went off his face when he saw me. It took about an hour to calm him down. Ten days after the crash I was ready to be discharged. Mum and Dad came to get me. While we were hanging around waiting for the paperwork, Jana came shuffling up. I tried to ignore her. ‘Do you know this woman, Brodie?’ Dad asked. ‘She’s one of Gerry’s patients,’ I mutter e d , hanging my head, ‘from Third East.’ ‘I beg your pardon, Madam,’ Dad said, very politely. ‘ I don’t think we’ve met.’ ‘Jana Kestrel,’ I muttered. ‘Kevin McPherson. My dad.’ Dad gave me a look. ‘Is there something you wanted to speak to my son about?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Jana said. Well, what could I do with the gaoler himself 80
standing over me? ‘I promised Gerry I’d visit Jana,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t felt up to it.’ Dad turned to Jana. ‘Brodie’s been a bit under the weather, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’ Jana nodded. ‘And once he gets home and rests up for a few days, I’m sure he’ll keep that promise,’ Dad went on. ‘I’d be glad to bring him into the hospital myself.’ ‘Promise?’ Jana said, like she was doing me the favour. ‘Sure.’ I had no intention of keeping that promise. ‘Are we going somewhere else first?’ I asked, in the car. We were heading north. Mum got all flustered. ‘Your mother and I thought under the circumstances it would be best if you came home for a while,’ Dad said. Mum put on her best social worker voice. ‘You’ll need someone to look after you while you’re convalescing, Brodie.’ ‘No!’ ‘Just till you get back on your feet.’ ‘No.’ I was starting to sound like a wind-up crow. ‘You can’t stay in that untidy flat, with no one to look after you.’ ‘There’s Atlas,’ I said. ‘You’re joking of course,’ Dad replied. It really burns me up the way people think they can just take over your life. There was Dad, convinced he knew better than me, that he had the right to tell me what to do. 81
‘Brodie dear …’ Mum began cautiously. ‘Don’t baby him, Marjorie,’ Dad interrupted. ‘ B rodie, what you don’t seem to realise is that these are very serious charges you’re facing. Your mother and I think that under the circumstances it will look better for you if you’re seen to be living in a stable family situation.’ ‘And you think they’ll decide whether I’m a murderer by my father’s credit rating, or by my mother’s shiny floors?’ ‘Brodie, don’t be like that dear, ‘ Mum pleaded. ‘ Your father and I are only thinking of your welfare.’ ‘If you don’t take me to the flat, I’ll open this car door and jump out,’ I said. ‘And I mean it.’ Dad put on his blinker and pulled over to the curb. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘But you’ll come running to us fast enough when the going gets tough.’ Don’t hold your breath. Why was it that Dad and I always ended up at one another’s throats, I wondered. Had I dreamed the tender way he’d held me in hospital after the accident? No one spoke for the rest of the drive, though when we pulled up at the flat, Mum had a last try. ‘Brodie are you sure you wouldn’t like to come home for a few days at least, just till you get a little stronger?’ I tried to keep my voice civil. ‘Thanks all the same, Mum, but I’d rather be here.’ Inside I was whining: Mum, Dad, look after me, help me. But it was too late for that. No one could protect me from what had happened or 82
what was to happen next. I’d better get used to it. ‘If you should change your mind,’ Dad said in a stiff voice, ‘your mother and I would be glad to have you back home.’ It was pretty decent of him when you consider everything. I tried to thank them but I couldn’t. I got out of the car, waved and climbed the stairs in record time in spite of my stiff aching body. Brad had started to bark the minute the car pulled up. He was nearly berserk by the time I got inside. Everything seemed diff e rent. Atlas had tidied up. Nowhere near Mum’s standards, but for Atlas an all-out effort. It wasn’t normal, Atlas making all this effort. Nothing’d ever be normal again. ‘She’s gone,’ I told Brad. ‘She won’t be coming any more.’ He seemed to understand. His tail drooped, his eyes melted into puddles of sadness. But it was the note that did it, just a casual Atlastype note, sitting on the kitchen table. Some of us have to work. take it easy. catch you tonight. Atlas. I put my arms round Brad, buried my face in his neck and began to weep. For myself and for Gerra, for Mum and Dad, and for the whole lot of us humans stumbling about in the dark, searching for the way to bear our lives.
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7
HEATHER ‘Leah told me that the Other People had the Memories taken from them,’ Jana was saying, ‘so it should not have surprised me when Fenna denied that he knew me.’ Leah, Other People, Memories, Fenna, I noted down. On the face of it this woman had a pretty poor hold on reality. I peered through the one way glass. She was middle-aged, dark, skinny, striking in a bedraggled sort of way. A queen in drag, a Gypsy queen, gone with the raggle taggle gypsieso, as we used to sing in choir. Well, everyone in Third East was a bit bedraggled. The place itself was pretty grim. Depressing. And boring-as. Barred windows, falsely cheerful green curtains, an out of tune piano, a TV set that went on only at certain hours, a table tennis table, and a bookcase full mainly of back issues of 84
Readers Digest. Enough to send you right off. The first time I visited the ward an old woman told me there were two thousand four hundred and twenty-four carpet tiles on the floor. She’d counted them. Can you imagine being so bored you’d count carpet squares? It reminded me of one Christmas at Nanna and Pop Enright’s. I’d played school with the pips from the Christmas cherries, lining them up in rows and telling them stories to amuse myself while the adults dozed the afternoon away. I’d chosen Jana as my case study because, from the first time I met her socially, she’d r e a l l y intrigued me. There was something compelling about the way she was convinced, almost to the point of arrogance, of the truth of her fantasies. No matter how off-beam they seemed to other people. And, after nearly two years of hospitalisation and treatment, her delusions were just as strong. But I think the thing I liked most about her was that she gave Dr Craigie-Fern a hard time. Everyone else treated him as though he were God. He expected it. I’d thought hard about whether I could bear to work with him, but in the end my interest in Jana the Quester, as she called herself, Jana Kestrel, as she was listed on her medical file, won out. ‘He imagines himself to be of this time/space zone,’ Jana went on, speaking of the young man she had met a few months back, and to whom she had assigned a mythological identity. Apparently the meeting had triggered off a suicide attempt. Craigie-Fern had given me a brief history and had arranged for me to observe so that I could assess 85
for myself the extent of her delusions. I don’t suppose he’d told her I was watching from behind the glass. ‘He denies the Memories and the Song Cycles he once sang in the Hytra.’ Hytra. Song Cycles. Time/Space Zones. This stuff was straight out of a science fiction movie. Dr Craigie-Fern adjusted his tie and began to examine his nails, one at a time. God that guy was a prick! I’d asked for a placement at Mordland General rather than one of the three private clinics, from an idealistic belief that public patients should have equal access to the best medical care, but I hadn’t been very impressed so far. A lot of the nurses were great, especially the young ones, and t h e re were one or two doctors who genuinely cared. But Craigie-Fern, for all his prestige, was a cold fish. I don’t think he gave a damn about any of the patients as people. Just as specimens for research. Jana was talking now about the loneliness of Questers. Questers, I scribbled down quickly. I wondered what Jana’s quest was. ‘He claims not to know me. Calls himself B rodie. Denies he is Fenna, holder of the Song Cycles.’ Brodie. Fenna. Neither name rang a bell. Were they the names of real people, I wondered? It was getting a bit over the top. Perhaps I’d been over ambitious. Perhaps this was out of the range of clinical psychology and into full blown psychiatric territory. ‘I feel his inner conflict. How he both yearns 86
towards, and struggles against, the Memories. We must return to the Unit together, so he may sing of my Journey, and restore me to my rightful position in the Clan.’ Her voice rose so triumphantly that I could almost imagine her a person of great honour and power in some faraway kingdom. Jana’s was a classic case of pseudologica fantastica. And yet t h e re was something about her that made it impossible for me to dismiss her story as merely pathology. Perhaps it was her pride, her certainty. She seemed to go into a sort of trance then, murmuring to Fenna to draw near, not to be afraid, that they would journey together. I completely forgot about my notes. C-F cleared his throat. ‘Thank you, that will be all for this session.’ He opened the door and ushered her out, winking exaggeratedly into the glass at me. That man was the pits. C-F beckoned me into the room. ‘And what do you make of that? Miss Er …’ ‘Enright.’ ‘But of course, I do apologise, Miss Enright. Or is it Ms?’ I went fiery red. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’ He chuckled. ‘Of course. Heather Breakwater Enright. Feisty clans, both the Breakwaters and the Enrights. And tell me, what do they think about your spending your youth among the flotsam and jetsam of the public hospital system?’ I didn’t answer. ‘But of course, your father has defended some 87
lost causes in his day. Most commendable. A chip off the old block, eh?’ And he laughed as if he’d just cracked the world’s funniest joke. When I didn’t laugh he went all formal, and blustered on about case notes, reading lists, the parameters of the study and so on. ‘Any questions?’ I blushed even redder and stared down at the ubiquitous carpet tiles. ‘Come on then girl, out with it.’ ‘ Well, Dr Craigie-Fern, I know this may not sound very professional …’ ‘Yes, all right,’ he snapped, ‘don’t beat about the bush, what is it then?’ ‘I want to, I mean, I’d really like to hear the whole story.’ His face was inscrutable. ‘The gibberish you just sat through for an hour you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘My dear girl,’ he said, with an exaggerated politeness that made me want to shout I’m not a girl, I’m a woman, do you hear? ‘Don’t you understand that what you so quaintly call the story, is in fact a symptom of the illness? And that to encourage Mrs Kestrel in her delusions, could lead quite possibly to an even greater retreat from reality?’ ‘But perhaps, when the whole story is told, it might make sense. I mean there might be threads, recurring motifs, archetypes …’ He returned to condescending politeness. ‘I see you have been imbibing the heady wines of Jung and his acolytes.’ I was stupid to have started this conversation, stupid to have chosen Jana for my case study. A 88
s t r a i g h t f o r w a rd case of postnatal depr e s s i o n would have been a better choice. I’d been reduced to a tongue-tied six year old. C-F looked amused. ‘I think perhaps a less radical approach, Ms Enright. Think it over. Now I must bid you good day, and leave you to ponder alone the mysteries of the human psyche.’ I was so angry I nearly cried. Damn and blast the man, as Grandpa Breakwater would say. He hadn’t even let me explain. He’d just assumed what I had to say wasn’t worth listening to. I fumbled in my shoulder bag for some coins. There was a phone in the foyer. I’d ring Felix. He was my supervisor, not C-F. Creativity and intuition were important clinical skills, he’d always told us. Psychology is as much an art as a science. I’ve been interested in people as long as I can remember, and had driven my mother and father crazy with what Mum called my ‘nosy parker’ questions. It was no surprise to them that I’d decided to major in psychology at uni. ‘It figures,’ my father said, ‘you’ve always been obsessed with finding out what makes people tick.’ There was plenty of material to work on in our f a m i l y. Dad was an only child, but Mum came f rom a big family, five sisters, Mel, May, Mon, Glad and Tiny (Mum) and three brothers, Gray, Eric and Simpson. And all of them were eccentric. I didn’t know the uncles well, because they lived interstate, which was strange because Mum and her sisters were inseparable. I’d remarked on that to Mum once, and she’d asked me, rather sharply, 89
why I made moving interstate or being close to one’s sisters sound like a crime. Dad’s family wasn’t close. We only saw Nanna and Pop Enright at Christmas and birthdays. We didn’t enjoy it very much and I don’t think they did either. I used to wonder how it was possible for Dad to have them for a mother and father. I held a very special position in the family. Mum was the youngest in her family and her mother had died soon after she was born so her sisters had always tried to make up for that. Tiny’s not strong, they said, which was why they converged like a flock of fussy hens on my mother almost every day of the week. Mum had had a series of miscarriages. Then, when all the cousins were g rown up, and Mum and Dad had stopped hoping, along I’d come. Strong, healthy and female. The baby of the whole clan, the apple of my grandfather’s eye, the darling of my aunties and the longed-for child of my parents’ middle age. Adolescence hadn’t been particularly traumatic for me. I hadn’t screamed at my mother or fought with my father. I’d finished school with moderate success and enrolled at uni in Arts/Law. The only slight ripple was my giving up law at the end of my first year. Dad was a bit disappointed, I think, but he’d never heavied me into following his footsteps. He knew my long-standing dream was psychology. All he said was, I may as well have a licence to be a sticky nose before I was arrested for it, and that if he ever needed marriage guidance counselling, he expected cut rates. 90
Psychology had not lived up to my hopes. I’d expected it to yield the deep secrets of the innermost recesses of the human mind, but it hadn’t. Some of it was enjoyable, like the observation sessions at the local kindergarten, or getting your friends to do word association or intelligence tests. But a lot of it was tedious and didn’t seem to have much to do with people at all. Rats and Stats we called that part — the collection of endless data, the drawing up of charts, tables, graphs and following the persnickety and inflexible rules for writing up lab notes. Then there were the less than thrilling films on stuff like hand–eye co-ordination in infants, which seemed to consist of nothing more than a succession of drooling babies in high chairs trying for hours on end to pick up a smartie or a plastic block. Then, in my Honours year, everything changed. In the first week of semester, Prof Br e m e r announced there would be a special weekly seminar for those who were interested. An optional and non-accredited course in the Human Potential movement. It would be conducted by Dr Felix Sanderson, who’d gained his PhD in California and recently returned to take up a teaching post at this university and to set up a practice employing some of the methods he’d studied in America. The way Prof spoke it was as if this guy had a doctorate in devil worship and he’d come back to Australia to establish a practice in human sacrifice. ‘Let’s go to it,’ I said to my friend Luce, as we lolled about in the ref after the lecture, spinning 91
out our coffee break as long as we could. Luce and I had been in the same lab group since first year, and we wrote up most of our experiments together. We didn’t see eye to eye about a lot of things, but we were both interested in clinical psych. We spent a lot of time together in the library and the lab as well as in the ref, drinking coffee. ‘ F o rget it,’ she said, eyeing off her Nicole Kidman profile in the plate glass window. ‘What are you two hassling about?’ It was Jeremy. He was in our lab group too. I’d known him since we were little. We’d gone to each other’s birthday parties since we were toddlers. His parents and mine were friends. Our fathers were both lawyers and our mothers had known each other forever. ‘The seminar Prof announced this morning,’ I said. ‘Luce thinks we may damage our prospects if we start associating with the lunatic fringe. What do you reckon?’ ‘What I reckon,’ Jeremy said, ‘is that we’ve got more work than we can poke a stick at, right now.’ Luce shook her hennaed curls. ‘My sentiments exactly.’ ‘Well, I’m going,’ I said. J e remy sighed exaggeratedly. ‘I suppose I’d better accompany the infant, to make sure she doesn’t get herself into anything too weird.’ I smiled at him. ‘Thanks, Grandpa.’ T h e re were six of us. Seven, with Felix. ‘We won’t stand on ceremony,’ he said, and got us to sit in a circle to introduce ourselves. ‘First names 92
all round, that way we make it clear from the beginning that we each intend to participate in an intimate way.’ There were a couple of stifled giggles at that. Felix picked up on it straightaway. ‘I guess some of you may have participated in an intimate way with one another already.’ We all laughed. Then he got us to tell the group why we’d decided to attend the seminars and what we wanted to get out of them. Some of the people rattled off a spiel as if they’d rehearsed it, but Jeremy and I were both a bit tongue-tied. Because they sounded interesting, was all Jeremy said, even when there was a significant pause which made it obvious Felix expected mor e . Jeremy was about the most strong-minded person I knew. There was no way you could force him to do something he didn’t want to. I’d found that out a long time ago. In the end Felix had to go on to the next person. When my turn came I said that I thought it sounded interesting as well, and I’d like to hear about what he’d studied in America. ‘But what do you want out of it for yourself?’ he said, his blue eyes gazing intently into mine, as if he saw into the very heart of me. Something in me stirred. Confusion, embarrassment, excitement. No one had ever addressed me as an individual, I’d always only been seen as a member of a family, a class or a group and here was this man asking me what I, Heather, felt and needed and wanted. I blushed stupidly, like I always did, and couldn’t think of a thing to say. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘try this. Imagine we’re alone 93
together, old friends, and I come up to you and ask you to take a walk. Remember, we’ve known each other for years, gone through school together, confided about our first sweethearts, helped patch one another’s broken hearts. So we’re on this walk see, and I say to you, ‘Say Heather, I hear you enrolled in this wacky new psych seminar. Why’d you do that? What do you hope to get out of it?’ and then you open your mouth natural as anything and say, “Well Felix …” ’ He mimed w o rds coming out of his mouth. ‘Try it,’ he encouraged. ‘ “Well Felix …”’ ‘Well Felix,’ I stammered, a bit startled by the way he’d just described Jeremy’s and my friendship, as though it were between him, Felix, and me. ‘Um, I hope to understand more about the different approaches and …’ ‘And?’ he prompted. ‘Find some alternative to rats and stats,’ Jeremy quipped. Felix laughed loudly. ‘Great!’ he said. ‘Saved by your loyal buddy. How does it feel to be rescued by the knight on the white charger? Wonderful, eh?’ I nodded, not sure if that was the right response or not. Jeremy scowled. ‘Well, you may not believe me, but an even greater joy than being rescued is to know your own authentic being, and to allow it to be revealed to others. In a few weeks you’ll be fighting one another for the privilege. We’ll all be one big happy family.’ ‘God, I hope not!’ Jeremy muttered under his breath. 94
‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Jeremy as we headed up to the car park afterwards. ‘He’s a wanker, of course, but some of what he said was interesting.’ ‘You going to come next week and learn how to share your authentic self?’ Jeremy mimed karate chopping my neck and then laughed. ‘Yeah, I reckon,’ and patted the bonnet of his car fondly. ‘Hi Esmeralda, wanna go for a spin sweetheart?’ A trendy looking guy lowering himself into a neat little MG gave Jeremy a weird look but it didn’t faze Jere m y. He never cared what other people thought, he just went ahead and did whatever he liked. He owned just about the last Morris Minor in the whole world, I think. He was rapt in that car, talked to her non-stop and coaxed her along encouragingly. She’d only go about sixty ks maximum, but she was a stayer, Jeremy said, and a very light eater. ‘Whatever happens it’ll be a bit more interesting than Bremer and his scientific method crap,’ he said, tossing his books and folders into the back seat of Esmeralda. ‘Or Filokowsky’s rats.’ ‘You said it. See you tomorrow, infant.’ My battered little Toyota was in the next bay. I slid behind the wheel with the feeling that this was going to be the year it all happened for me.
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HEATHER Felix was about the most open person I’d ever met. He made everybody I’d known till then seem superficial and shallow. He really paid attention when you expressed an opinion, and he didn’t hide behind the so-called scientific method. He was the only psych lecturer I knew who talked about human experience in a real way, who shared his own feelings and spoke openly about his life. I could have listened to him forever. I’d been waiting all my life to hear this. I sped through the prescribed texts and asked for extra reading. I took to dropping by his study every couple of days to return the books he’d lent me and to borrow more or to talk to him about what I was reading. A whole new way of looking at the world had opened up. ‘ E x a c t l y,’ he said one day as I was trying to 96
explain, ‘and aren’t these times precious, when new perceptions rush in? You must honour yourself for having the openness to allow them.’ His brown eyes held mine in a mesmeric gaze. ‘Every human being is a work of art, and the psychologist, like the artist, must release that work of art from the clay of whatever imprisons it. And if I have in some small way contributed to the releasing of the work of art that is Heather Enright, then I am humbly grateful.’ And he kissed me. The year became a roller coaster ride between agony and ecstasy after that. My thesis topic, of family and personal counselling methods, seemed mundane compared with what we were learning in Felix’s seminars. But Felix encouraged me, saying it was always wise to have a sense of where you had come from before stepping off into the unknown. He spent hours telling me about his work in the States. Some of the groups he’d attended sounded pretty freaky. ‘I was absolutely naked, Heather,’ he’d say, describing some particular technique, ‘naked right down to the bare bones of my being.’ I wondered naively, the first time he said it, whether he meant he had no clothes on. But more scary and deeply exposing than physical nakedness, I soon learned, was the psychic and emotional nakedness he strove for. The physical nakedness sometimes re q u i red was mer e l y symbolic of one’s preparedness to be vulnerable and authentic. I suppose it’s not surprising then 97
that I offered no resistance the night he unbuttoned my shirt and began to stroke me. I wanted to be open, to be worthy of his interest. Besides, he was touching my breasts in a way that made it difficult for me to think clearly. ‘I want to make love to you,’ he said, quietly, matter of factly, as though he were offering me a cup of coffee. Earlier in the day I’d called by to discuss the Fritz Perls book he’d lent me. He was busy, he said, but he’d be working back that night, so if I wanted to call in the early evening he could give me half an hour. We made love right there in his office, on his hand loomed Navajo rug. I was terrified someone might find us, but he said not to worry, we were the only people in the building. Afterwards he gave me a cigarette. I didn’t like to tell him that I didn’t smoke. ‘Of course you know that I am already in a relationship,’ he said then. I hadn’t but I was too embarrassed to say so. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I bumbled out. ‘I mean, that’s okay.’ He smiled. ‘Good girl,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you understand that whatever feelings we might wish to explore together have nothing to do with anyone else.’ A two timer is what Dad would’ve called him, but Dad knew nothing about the new, open way of relating. Dad was hopelessly conservative, like all lawyers. Felix cautioned me then in a chagrined sort of way that the mediaeval rules of the university forbidding sexual relationships between students and 98
staff meant also that we could not be open about what had passed between us. ‘As you know,’ his brown eyes as sad as a spaniel’s, ‘I would rather live my life in total openness. But we both know the conservative element would jump at the chance to get rid of me.’ ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I won’t say anything. Really.’ ‘You’re a very special person, Heather.’ And I determined never, by a word or a gesture, to betray him. The seminars were both agony and bliss after that. To be so close and yet keep up the student/lecturer facade was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Felix was scrupulous and singled me out for no special attention, which showed how deeply he cared for me. I was devastated when after another ecstatic love-making session a few weeks later, he asked me not to come to his office so often, or we’d be providing the small-minded element of the department with ammunition. I cut back my visits but began to phone him almost every day. Even to hear his voice was bliss. He was always kind even if he sounded a bit distant and preoccupied. And sometimes we arranged to meet at a cafe along the coast road, or go to his flat — not often, but enough to keep me in a state of edgy expectation. I hung about campus till late nearly every night, mooning over coffee or scribbling Felix and Heather in the margins of my notebooks, waiting to snatch an hour or two with him. I hardly saw 99
my family and friends. I’d been doing less and less s t u d y, what with being with Felix and, when I wasn’t with him, daydreaming about it. Also, spending a lot of time reading his books and discussing them with him. Now, I was seriously worried that I would not get my thesis completed on time. There was no way I could tell Mum or Dad, they just took it for granted I’d get through with flying colours. If I could just hang out till the end of term, p e rhaps Felix and I could go away somewhere together for a while and relax. Somewhere where we didn’t have to hide and pretend all the time. ‘Well,’ I bubbled to Felix on the phone, ‘how about it? Just you and me, wouldn’t it be wonderful?’ ‘It would be wonderful,’ he replied, rather cautiously. My heart sank, but I kept up the bright facade. ‘Then why not? All the ads say “Run away to Bali together”.’ He turned serious then. ‘I’ve never lied to you have I?’ ‘No.’ ‘You’ve known I was in a relationship all along?’ ‘Yes.’ My throat was so dry I could hardly get the words out. ‘Well, the fact is, I am going to Bali at the end of the year, for a month.’ I almost stopped breathing. I knew what was coming next. ‘With, with her, I suppose?’ ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘You need to know this 100
H e a t h e r, I’m getting married at the end of semester.’ He said that it didn’t necessarily have to affect what we had together. He felt sure I was adult enough to understand this and not be dictated to by society’s outmoded mores. He told me I’d come a long way in my personal development these last few months, and that he was proud of me. I said I had a lot of work so I’d better get back to the library, and that I’d see him round some time. I put the receiver down in a daze. When someone tapped on the door of the phone box I gathered up my purse and keys and stumbled out. It wasn’t as if he’d lied to me about this other relationship, so what was I carrying on about? But all along I’d been waiting for him to tell me we’d be together, f o re v e r. Hadn’t he said there was something special between us? Hadn’t he told me I was so much more open and fluid in my feelings now? Touchy, off balance, brittle, my parents and the aunties said, but they just didn’t understand. So why was he getting married to someone else? What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I measure up? I tortured myself with that question for weeks. The seminars finished, and everyone was flat out getting the final drafts of their theses done, so I didn’t see anything of Felix. Then one day I went in to see Prof Bremer and ran into Felix in the lift. ‘Good to see you Heather,’ he said breezily. ‘I’m just taking these papers to the secretary’s office. Walk along with me?’ I nodded, dumbly. He acted so friendly, as if 101
nothing had happened. Perhaps he was going to say it was all a mistake. That it was me he really loved after all. But no, he was talking about courses. ‘Tell me, are you considering Masters?’ Not since you told me you were getting married, I retorted silently. The lift came to a standstill and we got out and headed towards the secretary’s office. At the door I turned and started to hurry away. ‘Hey,’ he laughed, ‘not so fast. Where’s the fire? Besides, you haven’t answered my question.’ ‘I have to see Prof Bremer.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Drop by when you’re through, will you? There’s something I want to discuss with you.’ I didn’t go back. I didn’t set eyes on him for more than a year in fact. I buried myself in my thesis for the next few weeks and when that was done I joined forc e s with Mum and the aunties, making the Christmas cakes and biscuits, freezing and bottling fruit and vegetables, making the first of the raspberry jam. It was just like old times the aunties said, except that I was too pale and quiet, by half. A friend of mine had been killed recently, in a car accident, I told them, and the news had really shocked me. That’s why I was subdued. That made them fuss over me even more. I felt like a fraud. A girl I knew had been killed — Gerry. But I’d only met her once or twice. I’d thought she seemed pretty genuine, and lots of fun, but we hadn’t been more than aquaintances really. 102
Then my twenty-first birthday arrived. The aunties had banded together and bought me a round-the-world plane ticket. Dad and Mum gave me a cheque for $5000 to go with it. ‘Though whether you wouldn’t get more benefit from bumming around on a few hundred dollars and a prayer, I’m not sure,’ Dad said, when they gave it to me. ‘But you might as well enjoy some of my ill-gotten gains.’ Everything happened quite quickly after that. I d e f e r red my enrolment for a year and, with Jeremy and two of his friends, I set off to see the world. We had a great time. I saw Europe without Felix, America without Felix, India and Africa without Felix. Then I met up with old school friends Julie and Emma in Amsterdam, and they persuaded me to come with them to London. They had jobs lined up and thought they could get me one too. Soon I was immersed in the routine of office life, and the weeks took on a pattern: tube, c rowded markets, plays, movies, galleries, weekends in Paris, dodging the unpre d i c t a b l e weather. I was pretty settled, in a grey dreary sort of way, when a letter arrived from Prof Bremer, forwarded on by Mum. He wanted to know whether I wished to enter the MA program the following year, and asked me to contact him at my earliest convenience. There was a note from Felix scrawled across the bottom. It read: G reat if you could be part of a new counselling 103
research project we’re setting up. See you soon. Fondly always, Felix. I phoned Mum and Dad and told them I was coming home. Perhaps if Jeremy had been there I might have discussed it with him. But he was off trekking in the Himalayas, so I just gave notice, packed up, and left. The first thing I did when I got home was ring Felix. ‘Heather!’ he enthused. ‘You’re back! Great to hear from you! Call in and have a coffee sometime and we’ll talk about the course.’ I borrowed Mum’s car and went straight over. I said hello to the secretary and to Prof Bremer, who said he was glad to have me back. Such a conscientious and promising student, even if my ideas were sometimes a little unorthodox. I knocked on Felix’s door. He gave me the hugest bear hug you could imagine and a year telescoped just like that: Europe, America, the months in London. My hardwon independence evaporated. I was back where I started. My heart sang. He outlined the course. I said it sounded interesting, but as I’d been away from study for a whole year I was a little uncertain about being able to pick up where I’d left off. I’d have no trouble at all, he assured me. With some preliminary reading and a few coaching sessions from him I’d be on top of it in no time. ‘ You can’t think how good it is to have you back, Heather,’ he said then. My legs turned to jelly. This is a married man, I reminded myself, you are his student, that’s all. 104
With Felix’s help I worked out a r e s e a rc h p roposal which was approved by the Psych department, then I set out to catch up on a year’s journal articles and theoretical developments in psychotherapy. By the time semester began my interest and excitement were rekindled and the loneliness of the past year forgotten. Things would be different this time. Everything would work out the way I wanted. So now I stood in the hospital foyer fuming as the phone rang and rang. Come on Felix, I thought, be there. I was just about to give up when someone picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’ A woman. She sounded distant. Cool. ‘Hello, I was wondering … I mean … is … could I … I need to speak with Felix, please.’ ‘Who is this speaking?’ ‘Heather,’ I gasped, ‘I’m one of his students, he said, he said it was okay to ring him at home …’ ‘Marilyn Sanderson speaking,’ she said in the same cool tones. ‘I’m afraid Felix is not in at the moment. He’s at his flute class. Can I ask him to call you back?’ ‘Thank you, no, I’ll ring later. Sorry to …’ The phone clicked down. I stood there shaking for a moment, then giggled. Flute class! I pushed my way through the hordes of hospital visitors and out to the car park. Then, safely inside my car, I cried all the way home. Had I done the wrong thing in ringing him at home? I asked Felix this the next day, after the weekly seminar. His wife had sounded a bit 105
offhand. He assured me that it was okay. ‘That’s just Marilyn,’ he said, ‘she lives in a dream world half the time.’ ‘Funny you should say that,’ I said, ‘because that’s just what I wanted to talk to you about!’ He looked a bit puzzled. ‘Marilyn?’ My throat constricted. I laughed weakly. ‘No, living in a dream world.’ I told him about the session I’d just observed. How Craigie-Fern had mocked my idea of listening to Jana’s story as if it were true, rather than trying to persuade her it was delusion. ‘I see,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘dissolving the barrier between narrative truth and historical truth. Hmm, very much on the cutting edge. And then?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t really know yet. Perhaps just trusting her to show us how we can help her become her own work of art, as you put it.’ Felix laughed. ‘Quoting my own words back at me Ms Enright!’ We talked about it a bit longer. He told me that he was proud of my innovative approach and that he would speak to Dr Craigie-Fern as soon as possible. Basking in the warmth of his approval I gathered up my things to leave. He was looking at me rather thoughtfully, and I hoped he wasn’t having second thoughts about agreeing to something that was a bit way out. ‘I’d like to show you my house,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s really quite something, I call it my inner sanctum. We’ve only recently finished building it.’ 106
I nodded, blushing furiously, cursing my Viking ancestors for the umpteenth time for the way my fair skin betrayed me. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I’m finished for the day, and it’s particularly lovely at the sanctum at sunset.’ The house was in the foothills of Mount Verdant, about twenty minutes drive from the university. It stood in a clearing, on a gentle slope. It was pine, built in a series of spirals, that led the eye down the slope and inwards at the same time. I could see why he’d named it the inner sanctum. The leadlight windows were rainbows of glorious colour. Felix led the way inside, across a timbered deck. It was like entering a seashell. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I breathed. ‘It’s nice isn’t it,’ he agreed. ‘I designed it myself. It’s my own modest work of art.’ He led me to a staircase that wound upwards round a massive tree trunk, into a golden sunfilled room that looked out onto treetops. We gazed out for a few minutes. Then he put his arm round me and lowered me onto a pile of velvet cushions and, quietly and tenderly, began to take off my clothes. ‘But,’ I stuttered, ‘your wife, won’t she …’ ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Marilyn and I trust one another completely. We have no desire to limit each other’s freedom.’ When he saw that his reassurances had not dispelled my anxiety he added that his wife was attending a cultural reception that evening, to do with her work as a translator. ‘Besides,’ he said, unbuckling his belt and 107
sliding his jeans down over his hips, ‘this room is my re t reat and Marilyn would never dream of entering it. In another part of the house she has her retreat too, which I totally respect. It’s where she translates her folk stories, where she can be completely Bulgarian, without having to make allowances for an ignorant Australian like me.’ I wanted to ask more about her: for instance why her name was Marilyn, which didn’t sound very Bulgarian. But Felix was kneeling beside me, pulling my head gently into his lap, stroking my face and shoulders and breasts. And so while the magpies carolled outside in the setting sun, I climbed back onto the hectic, crazy, roller-coaster of our secret liaison. On Third East, psych students were lower on the totem pole than medical students, and both were only one step above the domestic staff. But when I turned up for my first session with Jana, I was buoyed up by my reinstatement in Felix’s affections and his promise to deal with C-F. I felt invulnerable. Although the ward sister looked down her nose at me, I smiled at her. She waved her hand towards a cluster of gre y - g reen easy chairs at the far end of the room, and with bad grace led me to them. Jana was sitting hunched over a game of patience, the cards lying in haphazard rows on a scuffed vinyl coffee table before her. An old man sat beside her, pointing at various cards, obviously teaching her the game. He had the longest, boniest fingers I’d ever seen. ‘Eight of diamonds on that pile,’ he pointed. 108
‘Now the ten of clubs there, no there.’ His long index finger stabbed the air. ‘Mrs Kestrel?’ Jana did not look up. The ward sister sniffed impatiently. ‘Mrs Kestrel,’ she repeated, peremptorily. ‘Miss Enright is here to see you; the psychology student from the university. Remember?’ Jana waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, indicating the sister should leave. I could hardly suppress my grin. She certainly knew how to beat this sister at her own game. ‘If it’s convenient,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I mean, when you’ve finished your game. I don’t mind waiting.’ The sister huffily retreated to the nurses’ station at the far end of the room and Jana gestured for me to sit. The game was evidently unknown to her, but judging from the look on the old man’s face, she was picking it up quickly. When she’d completed the four suits, the old man rubbed his bony hands together with a swishing, papery sound, snatched up the cards and began to shuffle them for the next game. Suddenly he got up and t rotted off, clutching the cards and muttering fiercely, as if arguing with an unseen opponent. I led the way down the corridor to an empty interview room. A small nondescript box furnished with the same carpet tiles and gr e e n curtains as the ward. The walls were covered in beige vinyl tiles and there were some plastic chairs strewn about haphazardly, and a dejected rubber plant in a brown plastic pot in one corner. T h e re was an awkward silence while I 109
w o n d e red how to begin. She’d agreed to the sessions with me, and she knew they would be part of my training, but just what she understood, or thought she’d agreed to, I had no idea. I was interested in recording her story, I told her, pulling the tape recorder out of my bag. ‘Why?’ Her question was so abrupt it surprised the truth out of me. ‘I don’t really know.’ I could feel my face and neck going bright red. What a stupid answer! But the truth was I didn’t know. At least not in a way that I could explain, but it hadn’t been very professional of me to admit that. Words came into my head: I am an envoy to a distant court. I glanced nervously at Jana. It struck me that she did look rather like a queen holding court, and I, a rather inept emissary. I pushed the crazy thought away and tried to regain my composure. ‘It’s an experiment, I suppose you could say. And a desire to understand. Beyond that, I don’t really know yet.’ She seemed to accept my answer. Per h a p s because I wasn’t trying to pretend I knew more than I did. Naked and vulnerable, as Felix would say. Well that was certainly how I felt. I was glad Craigie-Fern wasn’t observing me from behind the glass. I’d been reading recently about the breakdown of traditions among the Native American tribes after the Trail of Tears, and the prologue of one of the books had stuck in my mind:
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When the stories die the dreams fade, and when the dreams fade there is no more greatness. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, as though I had spoken out loud, ‘that’s how it is. The journeyings of the Questers will be lost if the Song Cycles are no longer heard in the Hytra.’ ‘Will you tell me the story,’ I asked her. ‘Perhaps I may be able to help you make sure it will not be lost.’ Whatever had made me say that? I was walking on thin ice here, encouraging her delusions. If anything went wrong I would not be able to hide behind the notion of narrative truth. Just as well I had Felix to back me up. She agreed to work with me twice a week until we had recorded her story. I would interrupt with questions as little as possible, I said, and later we’d go through the transcript and check the details t o g e t h e r. I asked whether she minded the tape recorder. She shrugged. There began a hectic, surreal time. The sessions with Jana, taking down her story, and in between, lurching through the highs and lows of my relationship with Felix. He still insisted it re m a i n secret. And putting up with Craigie-Fern’s harassment and fending off my parents’ and aunties’ insistence that I go out on dates, join in family activities, be normal. No one knew the double life I was leading, and it occurred to me, more than 111
once, that it was not really that diff e rent fro m Jana’s, except that my various worlds were supposedly real, whilst at least one of hers was a fantasy. After a while I got permission for us to work outside the hospital. Sometimes we’d use one of the psychology seminar rooms at uni, sit on the lawns, or go down by the river. I was amused when transcribing the session by the river, to hear Jana’s words punctuated by the squalling of gulls fighting for the sandwich scraps we’d tossed to them. I listened to the tapes constantly. In the car to and from uni, in the library, through headphones, and in the night when I woke and longed for Felix. My folder of transcripts got fatter and fatter. I started putting everything on disk and working out a system of cross referencing. The story would make a fantastic science fiction novel or movie, I thought. Many times I’d got caught up in the spell of it all and had to remind myself that I must maintain some distance, some objectivity. It wasn’t easy though. Jana was a compelling storyteller and was so obviously convinced of the truth of her narrative, that her fantasy world gradually became almost as real to me as it was to her. There were many questions I wanted to ask her, but I kept my promise to allow her to tell the story in her own way and her own time. The mysterious and often fragmented nature of the narrative both fascinated and frustrated me. When she came abruptly to a climactic point in her story one cold spring morning, I felt that we might be getting 112
somewhere. That her two worlds may be beginning to meet. ‘I walked into the white shining waterfall and was gone.’ Finally something that linked the two worlds! Nothing she had told me before this, other than the references to Brodie/Fenna, had had any connection with real life that I could detect, and now here at last was a clue. I’d read in the case notes that hikers had found her clinging to rocks in a pool at the second basin of the falls in Ridgeway Park. Two of them had hauled her out while the t h i rd went for the ranger. She’d been taken by ambulance to Mordland General, where she was t reated for cuts and bruises and shock. Thre e weeks later and still unable to explain coherently who she was, or where she’d come from, she’d been transferred to Third East. She’d told the hikers her name was Jana. They said her surname sounded like Kestrel. But although her photo was shown on TV and printed in newspapers, no relative or friend came forward. And there was no Jana Kestrel on the electoral rolls anywhere in the country. The mystery remained unsolved. I was pretty excited about the mention of the waterfall. At last we were getting somewhere . W h e re, I was not quite sure. I decided to risk talking to Craigie-Fern, but first I’d ring Felix and talk it over with him. Felix wasn’t in his office, so I left a message for him to call me at home. I made an appointment with Craigie-Fern’s secretary and then headed off. 113
I’d promised Mum and Dad I’d be home for dinner. What with Felix and Jana I’d hardly seen them in weeks. Dad was cooking, Mum said, and he’d be really pleased if I were there for once. ‘You look pretty chirpy tonight, chicken licken,’ Dad said, as he served up the vegie lasagna. He’s a good cook. He’d learned during his bachelor days, as a relaxation from studying he said, and he still occasionally fought off the female storm troopers, as he called Mum and the aunties, and took over the kitchen to produce one of his gourmet specials. ‘Yep, I am.’ He handed me a steaming plate. ‘Work going well, I take it?’ I nodded. ‘At last. You know I’ve been worried about this patient I’m doing my case study on?’ Mum and Dad nodded. ‘Well, I think I’ve finally found a link. I can’t tell you the details but I think it might be a breakthrough.’ ‘Little Miss Miracle Worker!’ Dad teased. ‘Heather, I am glad,’ Mum said. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked.’ She smiled at us both. ‘My pair of miracle workers.’ ‘What is Dad’s latest miracle?’ I laughed. ‘I don’t know about the latest, but getting that young lad off was no mean feat, ‘ Mum replied. ‘The police were determined to make an example of him. As if being responsible for his girlfriend’s death were not punishment enough.’ Dad could never handle praise. He looked down at his plate and muttered, ‘Needed his tail kicked, the young pup.’ 114
‘Why did you take on the case then,’ I teased, ‘if he was guilty?’ ‘Didn’t say he was guilty,’ Dad replied. ‘I just said he needed his tail kicked. Come on, the dinner’s getting cold.’ ‘Was that the case you wrote to me about while I was away, Mum?’ I asked. Mum nodded. ‘Then, was it ethical of you to get him off through some legal technicality, Dad? After all he did cause someone’s death.’ Dad put on his lawyer’s face. ‘Bro d i e McPherson’s main crime was inexperience. If they locked people up for that, the gaols would be overflowing. My own personal feelings about the boy …’ ‘What did you say?’ My fork poised in mid air, a lump of pasta slipping onto my table mat. ‘ H e a t h e r, what’s the matter?’ Mum and Dad were looking at me as though I’d gone crazy. ‘Did you say Brodie? Was it his girlfriend who was killed in the crash?’ Mum scooped the pasta back onto my plate. ‘ B rodie McPherson,’ Dad said. ‘That’s right. Kevin McPherson’s son. We were at Grammar together. Pleasant enough chap, though he hasn’t made much of himself, and the boy’s his own worst enemy. Mind you, he went through hell. Kevin asked me to take on the case.’ ‘Who was the girlfriend?’ ‘Geraldine, wasn’t it?’ Mum said to Dad. My fork slipped from my hand. ‘Of course! What an idiot! I should have realised!’ 115
My table manners appalled her, Mum said, but Dad laughed. He hadn’t seen me with so much life in me for a long time. ‘It’s a bit complicated,’ I said. ‘Like something out of Days of Our Lives. Geraldine was a nurse on Third East, a psych nurse. I met her the year I was doing Honours, before I went away. Brodie was her boyfriend?’ Dad nodded. ‘I must have met him too, about then. But there was so much going on at the time, I can’t say I remember meeting him. Anyway, it was through Geraldine that Brodie met Jana. He’s very important to her, in a way that I can’t go into, but he might be able to give me a clue, something to start to make sense of what Jana’s been telling me.’ ‘I’d take it very carefully if I were you … I’ll give you Marjorie and Kevin’s number if you like.’ ‘But he’s in hospital,’ I said. ‘He’s a patient on Third East.’ ‘Are you sure?’ Dad said. ‘Tallish, gangly, rather nondescript looking, and determined to shoot himself in the foot?’ I smiled grimly. ‘That’s him.’ ‘Poor boy,’ Mum said. ‘Well I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Dad said. ‘I got the feeling he was pretty close to breaking point months ago.’ ‘And you don’t think that Heather involving him with this other patient might not, you know, send him over the edge?’ Mum asked Dad. ‘I’m just a lawyer,’ Dad said, ‘Heather’s the expert here.’ 116
‘That’s just the point,’ I protested, ‘I’m not.’ I waited all evening for Felix to ring. Perhaps his wife was at home, or he’d had an emergency call f rom one of his patients. There could be a thousand reasons. I’d go in early next morning and catch him on my way to Third East. He’d be rapt when I told him about the waterfall and the connection with Brodie McPherson. He’d be able to tell me what to do next. I lay on my bed thinking about Felix. I’d hardly seen him for weeks, what with university, his private practice, and two new groups he’d set up at the community centre. He was so dedicated. I conjured a thousand images of Felix striding into my prissy, frilly bedroom, pulling me down onto the bed and covering me with hot urg e n t kisses. Like a Mills and Boon scene, it ran on. Heather my love, I need you, I can’t live without you. Complete with sky rockets and shooting stars. My English country-garden flowered bedspread magically metamorphosed into the woven rug in Felix’s tower. The moon glowed silver in at the window, mopokes called in the dark and Felix’s hands, feverish on my body, melted it to liquid fire. I cried myself to sleep.
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BRODIE And afterwards? After the trial? After I was acquitted? In all I’d spent a year at Mum and Dad’s. I buckled under and went home in the end. Dad and the lawyer insisted. Limbo. I was just about to crack up majorly when I hit on a new way of escape. Sleeping. No shit, it worked. It used up the days like nothing else. And no matter what I d reamed, how much it sucked, it wasn’t re a l . Nothing was as gross as real life. When I woke up after my first marathon effort everything was dead quiet. I padded out to the kitchen like a zombie. Everything neat and still. It was like everyone in the whole world had died and I was the only one left. I felt dull and heavy. The clock on the wall showed twenty past three. I’d slept all one night and half the next day. 118
I poked around in the fridge, fished out a couple of slices of cheese and some left over pasta, took a swig of milk from the carton and crawled back to bed. Next thing I knew, Mum was tapping me on the shoulder. The light was on and through the curtains I could see the dark outline of the silver birch tree trembling. ‘What time is it?’ ‘After seven.’ I didn’t dare ask what day. ‘You’ve been asleep for a day and a half. Brodie, are you sure there’s nothing the matter with you?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’ ‘Well, you’d better come and have some dinner now. Dad and I have had ours. We didn’t wait for you.’ Dad shook me awake the next morning and when I tried to push him away he said enough was enough. I had a job to go to, I couldn’t just sleep my life away. I shut my eyes and mumbled something about getting up in a minute and as soon as he left, I turned over and went back to sleep. The next day was Saturday. When I heard Dad’s car pull out of the driveway I got up and gave Mum a hand with the dishes and vacuuming and stuff. Then I fell asleep in front of the TV. I was back in bed before Dad got home, and on Sunday I slept all day, vaguely registering Mum and Dad going out and coming back from church. Dad was on my back at seven o’clock the next morning with the big lecture about facing up to my responsibilities. I was asleep before he got 119
halfway through his speech, I’d made sure of that by taking an extra half dozen of the magic pills when I’d woken in the night. I’d got a couple of p rescriptions from diff e rent doctors, no sweat. Spun them a yarn about work stress and family troubles. They’d all bought it. I built up a stash. No real plan, except to check out as often as I could. I was pretty screwed up. Whatever Dad thought of me in private, you had to give it to him, he’d moved heaven and earth for me. Got me the best lawyer he could find. Some old school mate of his, who specialised in tricky cases, drugs, political stuff, all that. Bit of a wanker, but he knew his stuff. The trial was gross, really gross. It didn’t really seem to be about the accident or whose fault it was. It was just a slick TV drama. Everyone had their lines, and there was no room for the stuff that really mattered. Only once the lawyer let me say it was my fault Gerry is dead. ‘That’s the last time I want to hear that sort of talk,’ he practically yelled at me. ‘You want to discuss moral culpability, you talk to a priest. We’re dealing with the law here, and I intend to win this case. Understand?’ And after the police beat me up, all he said was, ‘It goes with the territory. You’ll just have to wear it.’ So I said what he told me to say, and kept my mouth shut the rest of the time. He coached me, on what to do and not to do, how to handle the prosecution’s tactics; how not to let them make me say stuff I didn’t mean, all that. A lot of the time I 120
felt like telling him not to bother, but it was like being on a roller-coaster, impossible to get off, no matter how scared you were, or how much you wanted it to end. After a week of sleeping round the clock, Mum hauled me off to our family doctor, who sussed me out in about five seconds flat. ‘Are you using medication?’ Straight out, no bullshit. No lecture about moral fibre and facing up to my responsibilities. He just asked me how I was feeling. ‘I dunno, tired I guess.’ ‘It’s a very difficult time,’ he said. ‘You’ve been under a lot of stress.’ He asked me about my plans for the future . What future? With Gerry gone my future was wiped out. A time will come, he said, when I’d be ready to take up my life again. Next thing I was bawling like a little kid. People thought I didn’t care because I wouldn’t talk about the accident, wouldn’t go r o u n d weeping and wailing and saying sorry all the time. One time Atlas and I were playing pool down the Doghouse and these guys at the bar started to slag me off. Atlas wanted to get into a full-on punch up, but I told him, forget it. Okay man, he said, but he was pissed off at me. One of the guys sent me sprawling across the table and I just picked up the cue and started lining up my shot again. When we left the pub the guy followed us and backed me up against a wall and smashed his fist into my face and my gut half a dozen times and yelled, murderer! Atlas turned away in disgust. 121
After that I made excuses not to go out. By the time the lawyer decided it’d look better for the trial if I was living at home, I was past hassling about it. I left the flat without a backward glance. Sure I’d stay in touch I told Atlas, but every time he phoned I got Mum to say I was out. He was part of a world I didn’t belong to any more. Even when Brad got sick and had to be put down I felt nothing. Just that it was right for everything to be taken away from me. ‘Would you consider some outside help?’ the doctor asked me. I wondered what he was getting at. ‘I’d like you to see a friend of mine, John Bender.’ ‘What for?’ ‘I think it can help sometimes to talk to someone outside the family, someone who perhaps can help you see things in another perspective. You can’t stay asleep forever, you know.’ I threw him a dirty look. ‘John’s at the General. Psychiatric social worker. He’s had a lot of experience working with young people.’ Go and see a nutcracker! He must think I’d spun out totally. Next thing I knew I’d be in the vegie ward. He went on a bit about the addictive nature of the drugs I’d been taking, and said he was sure this John Bender dude could help me sort a few things out. Then he asked me to wait outside while he had a word with Mum. I guess he didn’t want me to watch Mum spin out when he told her 122
her son was psycho on top of everything else. The appointment was the next day. Mum came with me. I was beginning to get the idea of how the Royals must feel with minders tagging around after them all the time. Bender reckoned I should admit myself to Third East for a while. I shrugged. It was nothing to me. Mum cried when I told her. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘it’s no worse than being a murderer.’ It was the wrong thing to say. She went on and on about having failed as a mother, and it took both me and John Bender, who it turned out was not such a bad bloke, to get her calmed down. Getting admitted to Third East was a bit like being a chook on an assembly line: weight, height, blood pressure, previous medical history, all that shit. But at least they didn’t slap you round like the cops, or like in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I’d seen that movie with Gerra. It gave me the creeps. I can’t imagine how Gerra spent eight hours a day in this dump for months on end. Barr e d windows of course, double glazed. Pr e t e n d cheerful blue-green curtains, matching carpet tiles, laminex tables, a few easy chairs and up one end a kitchenette where two women were clattering about with pots and pans. A kid sat on his own, hunched over a video game, two people played table tennis in a sort of slow-motion way in the centre of the room and up the other end, in easy chairs, a couple of old grannies were staring into space, their knees jigging away and their jaws munching on nothing. Women in slippers listlessly 123
turned over the pages of magazines, and two nurses were having a game of cards with a scruffy looking middle-aged guy. Then I saw Jana. In the corner, perched on the end of a day bed, nodding and mumbling to herself or perhaps to one of her ET mates. No trace of the haughty duchess now. She looked sort of blurred and broken. I should’ve realised she’d still be here. I marched straight back to the sister who’d just finished admitting me and told her I’d changed my mind. That I wasn’t staying after all. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If you’d like to wait till John returns we can arrange everything.’ ‘I’m not staying,’ I repeated. ‘You can’t keep me a prisoner you know.’ ‘Of course not,’ the sister said with a laugh that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘There’s no question of that, Brodie. You admitted yourself voluntarily and you are free to leave once the discharge forms have been completed.’ She was talking in this ultra-calm voice, as if I was about to go berserk and start smashing up the place. ‘Everything seems a little strange at first, but you might find that once you have settled in …’ ‘Forget it.’ I turned on my heel. Jana looked up and saw me. There was nowhere to run. This was ground station zero, psycho-skid row. ‘Fenna,’ she said, quietly triumphant. She didn’t razz me for not staying in touch after I’d promised. She probably knew I’d had a bit more on my mind than ETs. Not that Dad hadn’t tried hard enough to make me go and see her, but in the end he’d given up. 124
But she hadn’t changed her tune. It was still the old number about Chanters and Heroines, betrayals, and journeys to the Outer Dreaming Zones. Outer Nightmare Zones was more like it. She was planning to go back to the Clans, she said, to take her rightful place, and she wanted me to go with her. I wondered if she was hinting at a suicide pact. Third East was something else. Everyone offthe-show in one way or another. Human computers with the circuitry gone haywire. From the old granny who thought the voices on the radio were plotting against her, to the guy who whipped out his dick and asked, about four hundred times a day: Now what do you think of that? He was a stevedore who’d been bashed on the head when a crane lost its load. There was woman who’d gone off her brain after having a baby, thought she was a rhesus monkey, groomed the baby flat out, all day. Funny little kid, looked a bit like a monkey, hardly ever cried and as long as people kept away from it, the mother was okay. But if anyone tried to touch it she went berserk. A couple of middle- aged housewives who r e a d Mills and Boon and smoked all day, or watched the soapies and sniffed into wads of Kleenex. A few lost looking guys wandering about restlessly. An anorexic kid looked like a Biafran refugee and walked in a jerky painful sort of way, had to be dragged to the table at meal times and made these little whimpering animal noises when the nurses tried to force him to eat. He had a drip more or less permanently attached. 125
After tea we all lined up for our knock-out d rops. The ones building up a stash only pretended to swallow theirs. It was that obvious it was a wonder the nurses didn’t notice. I gulped mine down and hoped I’d sleep for months. The next day, on the way to John Bender ’ s office, I saw Jana being wheeled off on a trolley towards the lift. ‘Where are they taking her?’ I asked, not sure whether to be relieved or worried that she was disappearing. Mrs Kestrel has been transferred to Fourth North, was all the charge sister would tell me. I asked one of the old timers. Women’s medical, she said. I wondered what the matter was. A few days later I was assigned a doctor. Not the topdog, a paunchy looking guy called Craigie-Fern, but a woman, Dr Hannigan. She decided in about five seconds I was a smart-arsed punk. I didn’t like her either. She was one of those superior types. She reminded me of a shark when she smiled. I answered her questions without telling her anything. That really got to her. What was there to talk about? I’d signed myself out of the human race. All I had to do now was stay out of trouble, keep Dr Hannigan off my back, and make sure I got enough pills to keep myself zonked out most of the time. There was still Jana to be reckoned with, and eventually, Mum and Dad, but the first obstacle was Dr Smartbitch Hannigan. At times it was hard to tell who was the weirdest on Third East, the staff or the patients. But, you can get used to anything in time and 126
pretty soon I started to feel I’d lived among these weirdoes all my life. Everything else started to b l u r, even Gerry. Mum and Dad, the Ta x a t i o n Department, my whole life before the accident was like a dream. Shep visited me once. It freaked him out. He kept looking over his shoulder, checking to see if anyone was hanging off the light fittings. ‘Relax,’ I told him. ‘We only go feral on full moon and they have the straitjackets ready for that.’ He blushed. I felt like a nerd. It’d been decent of him to come, after all. He rabbited on for a while about work. Everyone said, Hi. Damien’d been transferred to Billeton. They’d shifted all the desks around, after these office management people had come through and done some sort of survey, but other than that, nothing much had changed. Oh, and he hadn’t managed to crack on to Patrizia yet. I nodded. He could have been talking about Mars for all I cared. I think he realised in the end because he sort of dried up and just sat there , smacking a fist into his palm, and saying, Yeah, every now and again, till suddenly he leapt up as if he’d been shot, and said he was due back at work in three minutes flat. He practically ran out of the day room. One of the nurses came over and said how nice to have a friend visit. Call that nerd a friend? I said and picked up a century old Readers Digest and pretended to be mega-excited about some cruddy article on Brazil. She gave up and went away in the end. Yo u ’ re a bastar d , McPherson, one of the voices drawled. Nothing 127
flashed in the console, the drugs were working, robo-killer was out to lunch. About time too. I worked hard at being disliked, and I succeeded. It kept people out of my hair. The old ladies tutt-tutted. The housewives muttered: What I’d do to the young pup if he were one of mine. The anorexic kid cowered every time I went near him. I managed to blank out most of my feelings, just by listening to the voices and their snarky nonstop commentary — psycho-muzak I called it. It kept people and memories away, let me back off into a dry, high, faraway place where nothing could touch me.
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BRODIE Time dragged, one dreary day following another. It was like Sleeping Beauty, a hundred years behind the thorn hedge, except I wasn’t waiting for someone to kiss me awake. The dull routine of the days was kind of reassuring. Some things bugged me, occupational therapy for one. Playgroup for loonies. I made a few earrings, slopped a bit of paint about, which kept people off my back and was a lot less hassle than refusing to go. But it was the ward meetings that really got up my nose. Every morning for an h o u r, and attendance was compulsory. For us psychos, that is. The ward sister ran it. The social workers and psychs came, the medical students and one or two of the doctors. Not the big shots though. The format was always the same, first the charge sister talked about routine stuff, activities 129
such as visits from community groups and stuff like that. Then we were supposed to contribute ideas. We hardly ever said anything. In the last part of the meeting we were supposed to talk about what was on our minds. That was the bit I couldn’t hack. The usual whingers going on and on, the anorexic kid looking like a frightened rabbit, the daft old ladies babbling and old Jason big-noting himself, threatening the world. Sometimes one of the doctors picked on someone as a demonstration for the medical students or some big nob visitor, as if we were animals in a circus doing our tricks, or something. That really burned me up. They’d ask some poor scru b b e r, with her brain scrambled with Serepax, all these questions and she’d be bawling her head off before they let up. Then they’d ask us if we had any thoughts on what’d been said. I had plenty, but I kept my head down and said nothing. I hoped I’d never be put in the hot seat. I’d probably spit it and end up in a straitjacket. There was this girl who came nearly every day, who never said anything either, like me. She wasn’t a patient. She listened with her head on one side like a bird and wrote stuff down in a folder. She wasn’t much older than me, a psych or a social worker. One of those Country Road girls with the even white teeth, the yoghurt-and-freshfruit-for-playlunch skins, and the shining Decore hair. The funny thing was, she looked familiar. But I couldn’t remember where I’d seen her before. I tried to ignore her, tell myself she was a smug little bitch, with her expensive clothes and her 130
easy life. Getting her rocks off by perving on crazies. But every now and again the scent of wool and fresh air and the faint smell of jasmine round her hinted at something outside this half-world on the ward. Must be a thrill for her, the voices ranted, hanging out with a bunch of weirdoes. Once, she tried to get into conversation with me. The meeting had been held up for some big nob and we were all hanging about like caged lions. I was standing by the window, checking out the Mercs and Jaguars in the doctors’ car park, when she came over and said hello. Perhaps she thought I looked vaguely human. I didn’t answer, but that didn’t faze her. I bet she’d gone to one of those ladies colleges where they give them lessons in politeness. She made a few comments about the weather and then asked me if I found the meetings helpful. ‘ T h e y ’ re bullshit!’ Steady boy, the voices cackled, want her to report you to bitch-face Hannigan? ‘Why’s that?’ she said, mildly. ‘Forget it.’ ‘No, I really am interested in why you feel that way.’ The nob we’d been waiting for, some visiting Indian specialist, turned up then, so I was off the hook. But she eyed me off for the rest of the meeting. I didn’t know what to think. It was one thing bull-shitting to wankers like Hannigan and Sister Collick and the great Craigie-Fern, but this girl reminded me of Gerry in some ways, and I couldn’t bear the thought of some scre w e d - u p 131
punk bad-mouthing Gerry, the way I’d just done to this chick. I’d have apologised, but I didn’t know how. The next day she smiled at me, and said hello as if nothing’d happened, so I said hello back. No big deal, she was just some spoiled rich girl so what’d it matter. We all had to go to weekly group therapy sessions. It was a laugh. Mine was on Thursday afternoons, one o’clock. A bit like the morning meetings but we were supposed to really get down to it, no holds barred. Some of the people were outpatients. Must have been the highlight of their week. Pearce, the doctor who ran it, was okay I suppose, but a bit clueless. We raved on a fair bit. He smoked. One of the women brought her knitting one time, but he told her to put it away. She didn’t lift her head for the rest of the session. Bender suggested family conferences. I told him no way. He asked me about being adopted and whether I wondered about my real parents. I shrugged. Then he asked me straight out whether I’d like him to make some enquiries about finding them for me, and I said if he liked. My heart was beating like a mad drum though. It’d be a laugh if my name really turned out to be Fenna. That’d make me an alien and my parents ETs. But they weren’t as it turned out, and my name apparently was Darryn. One up for Marj and Kevin. I’m glad I didn’t end up as Darryn. My real mum was from interstate, a country girl. That’s all the file said. And that she was fourteen when I was born. 132
That’s the thing that rocked me most, I think, that she was only a kid herself when she had me. Bender said he’d help me locate her. I wasn’t s u re I needed more parents. I didn’t know whether I wanted to crash the life of someone who mightn’t want to know, someone who’d name a kid Darryn. No mention of her name. No mention of my father. Maybe she’d been raped. That’d make her extra glad to see me. I looked at the paper with her name on it a million times before I tore it in bits and chucked it in the bin. Who was I kidding? Hello Ma, it’s me, your son Brodie, I mean Darryn. Just been tried for manslaughter. Next time I saw Bender, I told him, forget it, and that was when he dropped the bombshell. M u t t e red something about the difficulty of making contact after all this time. The usual social worker bullshit talk. But something about the cautious way he was speaking pulled me up short. For one mad moment I thought he was going to tell me I really was from outer space and that he’d make sure I got back to my temple-singing or w h a t e v e r. The truth was far more ord i n a r y, far more shocking. Perhaps Marjorie and Kevin hadn’t known, he said. ‘Known what?’ His answer explained a lot. My mother had specified on the adoption papers that she wanted no future contact, and that her identity was not to be revealed to me. So I was a reject, right from the start. No wonder Dad thought I wasn’t worth shit, and Mum had this sort of guilty protectiveness 133
towards me. Probably thought it was her duty to God to adopt a stray. Maybe that’s what had really rocked me with all of this Jana stuff. The weird feeling that someone wanted to claim me, really reckoned I was theirs, when deep down I’d known all along that whoever I was born to had got rid of me as quickly and finally as they could. I sat there for ages staring at my hands. In the end I got up and shuffled to the door. ‘You sure of this?’ I asked him. He nodded. My whole life was like a mad acid trip, where no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come down. It was like being inside one of those lotto machines with the coloured balls whirling faster and faster, and any minute the machine would explode, and coloured balls’d start spewing in all directions. Five minutes earlier I was one person, now I was someone else. A big fat zero. Darryn Nobody. How many more twists and turns was this crazy movie going to take? Fenna, Brodie, Darryn — alien, reject, murd e re r. I was like one of those ducks in a shooting gallery, kept popping up for more. Kapow, he’s down, kapow, he’s up again, k a p o w, there he goes. Aim, fire, kapow kapow kapow! Bender called out to me but I just headed down the corridor to the foyer. No one around so I took the lift to the ground floor and walked out. Just like that. I expected someone to yell ‘stop’ but no one did, so I kept walking. Down the road, across the lights and into Davey Street. Up Davey, across 134
Smith, turn right into Harrington. I wasn’t consciously retracing the route of the accident, but when I found myself at the intersection I wasn’t really surprised. The lights flicked green amber red, green amber red. Cars revved, changed up, roared through. The ones coming the other way braked, idled, then revved up again. I stood there staring at the invisible skid marks on the road, watching a phantom blue Mazda turn over and over forever, on a cold August afternoon. Come back, Gerry, I begged silently. An old fish and chips paper snuffled along the gutter, propelled by a mean little wind. Please Gerry, come back. ‘What’s that bro?’ A soft gravelly voice, and when I didn’t reply, a concerned, ‘You right then?’ I looked up, embarrassed. Black sun-weathered face, greasy beanie pulled down over untidy curls, old army greatcoat, tatty blue runners. The kids in primary school used to call me Bro. How’d he know my name? ‘Anything wrong, brother?’ his voice a raspy whisper. Oh, ‘bro’ brother, not ‘Bro’ Brodie. Why was he calling me brother? Didn’t he know I belonged nowhere, had no real family? Next thing he had hold of my arm and was steering us back along the street. ‘You look as if you could use a drink.’ We went to the Bloodhouse. A real dive. I’d never have the guts to go in there on my own. It’s w h e re the wharfies drink, the roughest pub in town. Drunks staggering out shouting and swinging punches almost any hour of the day or 135
night. I shuffled in behind him, and waited awkw a rdly while he was greeted by half a dozen aggro looking blackfellers at the bar. A lanky kid was bending over the daggiest pool table I’d ever set eyes on. The felt top in shreds and one of the legs propped up on a crate. What if these guys wanted to beat the crap out of me? But no, they were just saying, Hey! How’s it going Bro/Unc? and the old fellow was saying hello back. He beckoned me over. TV set flickering over the bar and a bored looking barmaid. She nodded. ‘G’day Maxie.’ ‘Julieanne. How’s things?’ ‘Make room for a brother, hey,’ he said to his mates and one of them reached out and dragged over a stool. ‘Little brother here don’t feel so good,’ he said. ‘Needs a drink.’ ‘Don’t we all?’ the lanky bloke whose nose was lopsided from half a dozen brawls, drawled from behind the pool table. ‘You buyin’?’ a surly looking boy, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, asked. ‘What you doin’ here, Duane?’ my rescuer said as the boy sauntered up to the bar. ‘Cops get you for sure. Should be in school.’ They all laughed. My friend threw down a handful of notes, half turned to me and gestured toward himself with his chin. ‘Maxie, and you’re …’ ‘Brodie. Brodie McPherson.’ Among all these bruisers it sounded a poncy name, sort of weak and puny. 136
‘That one there’s Pumpkin and he’s Lindsay and over there’s Catfish, I mean Kenny …’ The three nodded. ‘Day Brodie.’ ‘And Slim and Monkey, known to their mother as Stevie and Mervyn.’ They all nodded and got back to the serious business of refilling their glasses. In a daze I drank what was put in front of me. The talk rose and fell around me till Slim and Monkey said they were off home for a feed. Maxie said he might as well go with them, he hadn’t seen his niece Cheryl, their mother, for a while and he could do with a feed and a sleep. ‘Might camp there coupla days,’ he said. I tried to imagine Mum’s reaction if someone just turned up and said they were going to stay for a couple of days. ‘Comin’ Bro?’ They meant me. They didn’t even know me so how come they were inviting me to stay with them? I followed them into the bottle shop where they bought a couple of slabs. Back out on the street in the grey, late afternoon cold they hailed cab after cab till finally one stopped. The driver leaned over and opened the passenger door. ‘You got money?’ They nodded and we all piled in. We went all the way to Annadale, over by the old gasworks. Mostly welfare and Aboriginal families lived there since they’d put the new tip well within smelling distance. I’d been through with Dad, taking trailer loads of branches and garden rubbish to the tip, and wondered how people could bear to live 137
there. The cab stopped outside a cruddy looking yellow house. Dogs started barking as we pulled up. A couple of kids came out onto the porch. ‘It’s Uncle Maxie and Slim and Monkey,’ they yelled back inside. We got out and went into the house. There were more people in the front room than I’d ever seen in one house before. Half a dozen old blokes playing cards, a million kids jumping around or sprawled on the floor in front of a blaring TV, two women chatting up fellows in tight Levis and an old woman dozing in the corner, oblivious to the row. ‘Cheryl!’ Maxie called, as two or three of the little kids wound themselves round his legs. A tousled looking woman came to the door of the lounge with a mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘Any chance of a feed?’ he asked her. She laughed and more introductions started. There was no way I was going to remember who everyone was, so I stopped trying. Bro t h e r s , sisters, aunties, uncles and about twenty kids, it felt like. Cheryl dished up curry, and slices of bread and margarine to mop it up, to the whole lot of them. For a while there was a lull while everybody ate. Someone offered me a beer, but Cheryl said perhaps I’d rather have cup of tea and I said yes, gratefully. The beer was swilling ar o u n d uneasily with the day’s Mogadon, not to mention the shock of Bender’s news. She sent one of the kids to make the tea and surprisingly, after the curry and a mug of the strongest brew I’ve ever 138
tasted, I started to feel a bit more human. But tired. I’d never felt tiredness like it. I tried to thank her for the meal and found my eyes swimming with tears. ‘Forget it,’ she said, waving my thanks away. ‘Mates of Uncle’s are always welcome.’ ‘Coming to the pub later on, Auntie Cheryl?’ someone asked her. ‘Nah, don’t think so. Might stay here and play cards. What about you, Brodie? You look done in.’ I nodded sheepishly. ‘I’ll just watch TV for a while if that’s okay.’ ‘No worries,’ she smiled. ‘Nice to have a bit of company other than this pack o’ drunks.’ They all laughed heartily. Eventually the crowd thinned out, some to the pub, some to the card game in the kitchen. I watched TV with the little kids for a while till they crawled off to bed, one by one, or dropped off to sleep on the floor. I was just dozing off myself when Cheryl came in with a blanket. ‘Here,’ she said, handing it over, ‘couldn’t hear any action from in here, so I figured you might be ready for a bit of shut-eye.’ ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled, turning my head away so she couldn’t see the stupid tears that were rising again. ‘Take it easy, ay.’ I wrapped myself in the blanket and lay back down on the lounge. In two secs I was asleep. It was a weird night. People coming and going nonstop, voices raised, arguing, laughing, singing, doors banging and the toilet flushing off and on 139
for most of the night. Somewhere a baby cried and was hushed. The next thing I knew a bunch of little kids with slabs of toast topped with baked beans were clambering all over the place, and the TV was blaring the early morning cartoons. For a moment I couldn’t make out where I was. ‘What’s your name?’ a little kid, about an inch from my face, asked me. ‘Brodie, what’s yours?’ ‘Brianna,’ she said, giggling. Pointing to a toddler staggering across the room with a nappy round its knees, ‘That’s our baby. He’s called Riley. He’s getting a new tooth.’ ‘G’day Riley,’ I said but the kid lurched to his sister and buried his head in her skirt and started to howl. A head poked round the door, and an arm scooped up the soggy toddler. Brianna picked up a comic and started showing me the pictures and asking me what the words said. I was just getting desperate when Cheryl yelled at the kids to turn the TV down. ‘And leave Brodie alone, Brianna, might be he want to sleep.’ ‘He awake,’ Brianna retorted. ‘He got his eyes open.’ ‘No wonder,’ Cheryl laughed, ‘with all this row.’ I got off the couch and folded the blanket. Cheryl heard me moving about and called me to come and get a coffee. We took it out to the back p o rch in the feeble morning sun and sat and sipped in silence. ‘Where you from?’ she asked at last. I told her. She just nodded. We sat there silently for a while, 140
the kids running in and out demanding drinks and more toast. I was glad she hadn’t asked me anything else, because I wouldn’t have known where to start, and I didn’t want to say anything that’d spoil the easy welcome here. A stiff breeze started up. Cheryl wrinkled her nose. ‘Phew, smell that tip.’ ‘I don’t know how you put up with it,’ I said. ‘Not much choice,’ she laughed, ‘unless we take the yacht out for a cruise till the wind changes.’ And she laughed again and slapped her knee. Slim and Monkey and one or two of the others, whose names I couldn’t r e m e m b e r, stagger e d blearily out onto the porch. There was no sign of Maxie. ‘I’d better be going soon,’ I said at last. ‘Thanks for the meal and the bed.’ ‘Sure you don’t want some breakfast?’ I told her the coffee was just fine thanks. ‘ Well, you know where to find us now,’ she said,’so you don’t have to wait for Maxie next time, ay.’ Brianna and Cheryl waved goodbye as I walked off down the street. My clothes were rumpled but I felt high and clear. It took me a while to figure out why. The voices. They’d stopped. It was a miracle. Perhaps they couldn’t compete with the real live ruckus of 34 Banksia Street. I sat at the bus stop, savouring the inner silence. When the bus reached the depot I got off and started walking up Davey Street, no real idea of where I was going. Someone called out to me. I stopped and turned round. Maxie? No, it was a woman, 141
young, neatly dressed. For a moment I couldn’t place her. ‘It is Brodie McPherson, isn’t it?’ Then I remembered. The psych from the Third East meeting. ‘I’m going up to the hospital now,’ she said, glancing at my rumpled clothes and messed up hair, ‘do you mind if I walk along with you?’ So, I was ushered back by a friendly gaoler who hadn’t even known I’d skipped off, although she must have wondered what I was doing, wandering around in town, looking like a hobo. I copped heaps of course, both in the meeting and later, from Sister Collick and Dr Hannigan. The only one who seemed to understand was John Bender but he was pretty low on the Third East totem pole. For a while I tried to answer all their questions but I soon gave up. The voices were roaring in my head again, laughing and mocking, making Cheryl and Maxie and all that warm-hearted mob look like cheap, tawdry drunks. My head felt like a footy at the end of an AFL final, and all I wanted was to blank out everything as quickly as possible. As soon as they’d all finished with me I looked for Mandy, a loud-mouthed woman I knew for sure was building up a stash, ready for another go at suicide. She laughed in my face when I muttered my request to her. ‘You want enough to off yourself puke-face?’ I shook my head. ‘Just enough to quieten everything down.’ It was a long time till evening medication and I was going bananas. 142
‘So why didn’t you ask them for the happy pills?’ I shook my head again. We told them as little as we could. It’d taken all of my energy to convince them that I wouldn’t go walkabout again. That they didn’t have to assign me a minder. ‘It’ll cost ya,’ she said, and when I told her I didn’t have any money on me, she nearly fell over laughing. ‘Not money, dork!’ It was gross jammed up against the tiles in the women’s loo, with her offsider Jean on guard outside. This must be what women feel like when they’re raped. She worked her furry tongue into my mouth and pushed her rubbery breasts against me. I told myself it was worth it to get the pills, but I felt sick and shaken when she finally released me, pushing a paper-twist of pills into my hand. The voices were going full-bore by now, raging and shouting. I emptied the paper into my mouth, scooped up a handful of water from the basin and got the hell out. The rest of the day passed in a daze and when it was time for evening medication I was first in line, swaying and tripping. The sister looked at me suspiciously but handed over the paper cup without a word. I gulped the contents down and the next thing I was out to it. I slept fourteen hours. Right through the precious meeting. They got on my case good and properly then. Demanded I tell them where I’d been the day before, how many pills I’d taken, what they were, and where I’d got them. When I wouldn’t, they accused me of refusing the help I was being offered in Third East, and threatened 143
me with a transfer to Oak Park, should my behaviour continue to be uncontrollable and disruptive. Locked wards, real raving loonies, shock treatment, brutal warders. I’d heard the stories, and I s u re as hell didn’t want to find out for myself whether they were true or not. I promised to lift my game and while I refused to rat on Mandy, I assured them that I’d never ask another patient for drugs. There was no way I’d want to rerun that little encounter, no matter how desperate I got. I wondered vaguely how Jana was. It’d been a while since she’d been wheeled away on that trolley. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to h e r, I’d just wanted her out of my hair. Fatal thought. Next day after the meeting, Heather the psych who’d sprung me in town, asked to speak to me. What now? I thought. She told me she’d been working with Jana, recording and transcribing Jana’s account of her journeys. Was I aware that I featured in the story? ‘So?’ She went bright red. I felt like a rat. It wasn’t her fault I’d made a mess of my life. Ended up in the loony bin. ‘Jana wanted me to show the transcript to you.’ I bet she did. ‘What good would that do?’ I asked, but in a less aggro way. She blushed again. ‘I don’t really know. But I’ve got a hunch it might help somehow.’ I wondered how much she knew about me, what Jana had told her. For about a millisecond I c o n s i d e red playing it straight. I mean r e a l l y talking to her. Almost immediately I killed the 144
idea. They were all the same these people, even John Bender in his own well-intentioned way. Getting their kicks from poking around in everyone’s problems, and telling people how to run their lives. ‘Have you heard of pseudologica fantastica?’ she asked suddenly. I shook my head. ‘It’s a psychiatric condition where people believe they are some important person fro m history.’ I wondered what she was getting at. ‘You may have heard of that American woman who believed she was the daughter of the Czar of Russia. She was absolutely convinced and had a lot of other people convinced too. Tru s t w o r t h y people. People who knew the family well. Some people still believe she really was who claimed to be.’ I saw something on TV about that. The family got shot in the Russian revolution years ago, and there was one body missing or something. ‘Perhaps she really was who she said.’ Heather looked thoughtful. ‘That’s just the problem.’ I stared at her. ‘You mean you think Jana …?’ ‘I’m not saying that,’ she admitted, ‘but I thought that since you’re on the spot, and you’re mentioned in the story …’ ‘As Fenna, you mean?’ ‘Well yes, but Jana seems to infer …’ ‘That Fenna and I are the same person?’ ‘Well, yes.’ 145
‘And what do you think?’ She had no answer to that. In the end I let her give me the transcript. What the heck. My life couldn’t get any crazier. Jana would be back on Third East in a couple of days. I asked Heather to keep her off my case, at least while I read the transcript. She said while she couldn’t promise anything, she’d speak to Jana about respecting my personal space. That was the sort of thing Gerra’d say. She’d always tre a t e d crazies as though they were normal people, with normal desires and rights. ‘You met her through Nurse Finch, didn’t you?’ Heather said then, deep colour staining her throat again. It was as if she heard my thoughts. My stomach lurched. ‘You knew Gerra?’ ‘Slightly,’ she said. ‘I met her at the Filmfest a few years ago and she invited me to a party at her place. Jana was at the party too. Gerry got day leave for her.’ The penny dropped then. The kitchen at Gerra’s. Polishing glasses. I’d been hiding from Jana. The quiet chick, that I’d treated like a nerd. I wonder if she remembered? Probably. She should have told me where to get off. Gerra would have. ‘She seemed like a wonderful person,’ she said. ‘You must feel her loss deeply.’ It’s funny the way people talk about losing someone as if you’d left them behind somewhere, like a parcel, and when you came back they were gone. You’d think there was a ban on the word died. For that matter she could have come right out and said killed. I didn’t look at the transcript straightaway. In 146
fact I waited till everyone in the ward was asleep, or at least in their rooms with the doors closed, and the sister had finished her rounds. Then I turned on the bedside lamp and started to read. A few pages in, I decided I’d had enough. Of Jana, of the vegie ward, of Mordland. I’m outa h e re, I promised myself. And this time I re a l l y meant it.
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HEATHER The first I knew about Jeremy’s return was Mum, stuck on the phone for hours one night, her voice hushed, and a little crease between her eyes that we’d all learned to interpret as Mum ‘in a tizz,’ as Grandpa Breakwater put it. ‘When will you be finished?’ I mouthed, at ten minute intervals, but she just shook her head, clutched the phone, made agonised faces and went on nodding and whispering. It was pretty irritating. What if Felix was trying to get through and couldn’t, because of some drama at the tennis club, or a quilting or bottling crisis? Mum could be infuriating sometimes. But no matter how I fretted and fumed she wouldn’t get off the phone. And they talk about teenagers! It seemed like everything was ganged up against me. Felix, for starters. Well, not Felix 148
himself, just the roller-coaster of emotion I was on, always on edge, waiting. And Craigie-Fern, sarcastic as ever, but these days with a triumphant gleam in his eye, because now Brodie McPherson was gone I was making zero progress with Jana. I could hardly get a word out of her. She’d become almost mute, sunk into near catatonia. If things went on like this I might have to abandon the whole project, which would be a disaster at this stage. C-F could barely conceal his triumph. Not that Felix had been much more help, with his vague reassurances, his advice to ‘hang in there and not get too intense about everything.’ ‘What do you mean by everything?’ I’d rung him to wail out my despair about the hospital, the research, my life. ‘You mean about us, don’t you?’ The words dropped like cold stones into the pit of my stomach. I stared at the pattern on the damask wallpaper by the phone table, and began to trace each raised floral whirl. Searching for the exact place at which it connected with the one next to it, while I waited for his protestations and denials. ‘I guess I do.’ I traced the raised edges of the wallpaper pattern up and round and over in a flourishing loop. Round and down and over again. ‘You guess you do. What’s that supposed to mean? You either know, or you don’t know.’ I sounded just like Pop Enright. I heard him sigh. ‘Heather, are you sure you’re not getting fixated in a way that’s a bit unhealthy? You might want to take some time out.’ I stared into the centre of one flowery curlicue, 149
my heart contracting into a hard kernel. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’ His voice came back suave and sure. ‘Doll, when things get on top of a person, it’s time for some distance. To take an inventory. Get some perspective on things.’ I’d never noticed till then what a mouldy puky green the wallpaper was. If I had to look at it for one more minute, I’d throw up. ‘You think so?’ I croaked out. ‘I do. I really do. A few counselling sessions maybe?’ ‘ With you?’ I began to trace the whorls and spirals feverishly. I was so obvious. ‘I think that may not be the best plan right now.’ I could feel a great scream rising in my chest. Why couldn’t he just dump that wife of his so we could be together, forever? It was obvious. That would solve everything. I turned my back on the puke-coloured wallpaper. My head was spinning and my legs had turned to lead. What was he saying? Something about getting back to me with the name of a counsellor. ‘Okay,’ I gasped, my voice hoarse with panic. I couldn’t understand why he was being like this. We loved each other, didn’t we? Be patient, I told myself, Felix will think of a way to fix everything. Have a bit of faith. As soon as he’d worked things out we’d be together, for sure. Anyway, he said he’d ring. He hadn’t rung. At least not in the last three weeks. He was flat out, I kept reminding myself, with his teaching, his counselling service, as well 150
as his research. And I suppose he was obliged to spend some time with that wife of his. God only knows why he’d married her — poor Felix — but it wouldn’t be forever, our time would come. He needed me to be mature and understanding, not a whining child. I wouldn’t run crying to him again, I’d work everything out on my own. Find my own solutions. I’d figure out a way to get Jana communicating again, and one day when I was just getting on with it, Felix would ring and say he’d missed me, and everything would be perfect once more. He might be trying to ring me right now. When was Mum going to get off the phone? The next time I poked my head round the hall door, she was sitting there, just staring into space, with the phone burring away in her lap. I took the receiver and hung it back up. The look on her face scared me. ‘Mum, what’s wrong? Is it Grandpa?’ She shook her head vaguely. ‘What? No, dear, he’s fine.’ ‘What’s the matter then?’ ‘It’s Jeremy. Angela’s just so upset …’ ‘Something’s happened to Jeremy? In England? He’s been in an accident?’ Mum shook her head. ‘Jeremy’s at home. At his parents’ place.’ I couldn’t keep the pique out of my voice. ‘He might have got in touch.’ ‘He only just got back,’ Mum said. ‘Something to do with a festival or a play or something. 151
Angela was a bit hazy about the details.’ ‘What’s so terrible about that?’ Mum was clearly embarrassed. ‘Well, it’s just that … Jeremy hasn’t come back alone, Heather …’ ‘He’s married? Jeremy’s married? He’s come home with a wife, without telling them? Is that what’s bugging them? Those two live in the dark ages.’ ‘He’s not married.’ ‘A girlfriend then,’ I giggled, ‘and Mrs French is going spare because her precious son is “living in sin.” That’s what they’d call it, wouldn’t they?’ Mum stood there silently, twisting her hands together nervously. My giggle died away. ‘Heather,’ Mum’s face was scarlet with embarrassment, ‘you must have come across this sort of thing in your studies. You know, abnormal human behaviour …’ The penny dropped. ‘Jeremy’s brought a man home with him?’ Mum nodded miserably. ‘A boyfriend? And Mrs French is freaking out?’ ‘It’s his father who’s more upset,’ Mum said. I could believe that. The man was a control freak. J e remy always said he was morally obliged to become a fence sitter, because his father had enough certainty for both of them put together. Jeremy gay? Well, he’d certainly come down off the fence then. Mum and I stood in the hall for what seemed like a year, staring at one another. I must admit I was having a bit of trouble taking in the news at first, but as the shock began to fade, things I’d 152
wondered about for a while started to fall into place. Whatever the story was, it wouldn’t be half as bad as the Frenchs were imagining. It was then I began to feel the weight of anxious expectation hanging in the air. ‘Mrs French wants me to go round?’ The last place I wanted to be right then was in the middle of a family feud. ‘Would you dear?’ Mum brightened up immediately. ‘You’re Jeremy’s age and you’ve studied all that psychology, you might be able to talk to him.’ ‘Mum, I don’t think being gay is something you get talked out of, or into for that matter.’ I was trying to sound cool, but really I was stalling for time. My first thought was, would Jeremy be so changed that he wouldn’t want me as a friend any longer? Being present during a major row at the Frenchs’ was definitely not my idea of fun. But Mum immediately picked up the phone and started dialling frantically. ‘I’ll tell Angela you’ll be round in ten minutes, all right?’ I nodded, wondering what on earth I was expected to do or say that would make any difference. Psychology wasn’t giving me any of the answers I wanted at the moment, yet people thought it was a magic wand you waved, and it fixed anything. Reluctantly I picked up my jacket and car keys, and headed off. That must have been the precise moment Felix rang. Mum said she offered to run after me, but he’d said not to bother, it wasn’t imperative he speak to me in person, he’d just rung to leave the 153
name and phone number of a colleague. Just that. Nothing personal. The name of a counsellor. I suppose he’d hardly have left a passionate message for me with Mum. She had no idea about our relationship. Anyway, she knew that Felix was married. He was being discreet, that’s all, I told myself, clinging to the memories of the times in his office.
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HEATHER It was pretty gruesome at the Frenchs. Jere m y seemed reasonably calm, and the sangfroid of his lover, a cool bloodless Englishman named Tristan, would have done justice to a dead fish. Mr French was just about gaga and Mrs French was not far behind as she flapped about, trying to calm her husband and fulfil her duties as a hostess. I suggested Jeremy make us a cup of tea. The good old panacea. It was the only thing I could think of, first up, but it got us all sitting down, at least. We balanced the best china on our knees and c o v e red all the obvious conversational trivia. Milk? Sugar? No thank you. Two please. Finally I broached the topic of the festival. Jeremy’s face lit up. ‘It’s a sort of opera actually. Tristan talked me into it. He’s the musical director and I get to boss the actors around.’ 155
Both men laughed. Jeremy’s, the brief delighted shout I had known since childhood, and Tristan’s more like a protracted smirk. ‘We’re working in a warehouse on the wharf, using half a dozen languages and theatrical traditions, not to mention musical instruments whose names you’ve never even heard of. Tris’s brainchild, that one.’ It was the old Jeremy, enthusing about his latest project, but from the way his face glowed every time he spoke Tristan’s name, you could see that Mr and Mrs French didn’t stand a chance. This was a new Jeremy, too. In love. After more cups of tea and passing round of s h o r t b read fingers, an awkward silence fell. Tristan offered to reboil the kettle. As soon as he left the room I broached the unspoken preoccupation of everyone. ‘I imagine you are feeling a little shocked by Jeremy’s choice,’ I ventured mildly, ‘and by having your expectations overturned.’ Jeremy winked at me. I suppose I did sound a bit pompous. I blushed furiously. But my words opened a floodgate. Mr and Mrs French’s complaints tumbled out onto the Axminster, splashed about among the Spode tea service and ricocheted off the Queen Anne furniture. ‘I’ll never be a grandmother!’ wailed Mrs French. ‘Well, how do you think it reflects on me?’ Mr French countered. ‘Disgusting.’ ‘Shameful.’ 156
‘Unnatural.’ ‘To you perhaps,’ Jeremy quipped, winking at me again. I must say Jeremy could keep his cool like no one else I knew. Grace under fire Grandpa would call it. Perhaps I ought to consult Jeremy instead of a counsellor about my problems with Craigie-Fern and the research project. J e remy smiled happily as Tristan re - e n t e re d , carefully bearing the teapot. ‘To us it’s as natural as breathing, isn’t it, Blossom?’ Was he deliberately trying to stir up his father’s anger? Tristan smiled back, his pale polite smile. ‘Well, I won’t have it in my house!’ Mr French spluttered apoplectically, jumping to his feet and taking a classic Victorian stance in front of the marble fireplace. ‘Two men kissing and carrying on, like, like …’ ‘Poofters?’ Jeremy suggested quietly. He wasn’t going to let his father off the hook. I thought Mr French was going to have a stroke. I was pretty angry with Jeremy, too. Did he have to push it in his father’s face like that? There were less inflammatory terms, surely. ‘Well, I won’t have it in my house, do you hear!’ ‘That’s your choice, Dad,’ Jeremy said quietly. I realised he wasn’t trying to upset his father, he just wasn’t prepared to be less than honest. He is about the bravest and most honest person I know. Mrs French began to twitter away, begging Jeremy not to upset his father this way. ‘I don’t think Jeremy deliberately meant to upset his father,’ I ventured, attempting to bring 157
the conversation back to calmer, more dispassionate waters. ‘And look on the bright side,’ Jeremy added with a grin, ‘it brought me home, Mum. If it hadn’t been for Tris here, and the opera, I’d still be languishing OS.’ The talk went on and on, until finally I began to sense some movement. The Frenchs were beginning to accommodate the devastating change. Pity Tristan couldn’t have unbent a little more, the British can be hard work sometimes. I’d met more than a few like him in London. Things were calmer, at least on the surface, by the time I got up to go, but I doubted it had much to do with psychology. I said so to Jeremy when he walked me to my car. ‘You were great,’ he assured me, planting a big kiss somewhere near my left ear. ‘I’m sure the p a rents and friends of the tortured souls of M o rdland will be singing paeans of praise to Heather Enright before you’re through.’ I swatted him with my jacket. ‘Jeremy, you’re an idiot.’ But his words warmed me, and my ear tingled where the kiss had landed. A sudden and awkward silence fell between us. Everyone had always assumed that Jeremy and I would end up together. We had been childhood sweethearts but somehow it hadn’t gone any further. Was it because of something lacking in me that Jeremy had turned away from women, I wondered. Then I pulled myself up. Good heavens, I was starting to think like the Frenchs. Looking for someone or something to blame. But I had to admit, I was 158
jealous. What did he see in that aloof cr e e p anyway? Just because I hadn’t made a move so far. I blushed furiously. It was pretty presumptuous of me and totally disloyal to Felix. Jeremy stood quietly, sensing the struggle going on in me. ‘Howzit going anyway?’ he said at last, draping my jacket over my shoulders. A cold wind had sprung up. ‘Too much drama inside for me even to enquire about normal people’s lives!’ He laughed. I smiled shakily. ‘Long story.’ ‘I’d like to hear it.’ His voice was so warm I nearly burst into tears on his shoulder there and then. Great. I’d been called here to avert a crisis, and now I was planning one of my own, right in the driveway. I hauled out my car keys and fumbled for the lock. ‘Come bowling with me,’ Jeremy said, following me to the car. ‘This weekend. We can catch up.’ I shook my head. ‘Not bowling.’ I’d had enough noise and drama for one week. ‘Then how about …?’ He made the action of a paddle dipping into water. I laughed. ‘How about it?’ he persisted. ‘Okay.’ Jeremy and I had done some great river trips earlier on, but I hadn’t been kayaking for ages. A day out on the river with Jeremy would be wonderful. ‘But what about Tristan?’ Jeremy put on a campy accent. ‘Oh, he can stay home and do his nails, dahling.’ We giggled. ‘Boat sheds, Saturday then? Hook Point, one o’clock.’ ‘One o’clock.’ I waved as I steered out into the deserted street. It was late, but Mum would be still 159
up, anxious to hear how everything had gone. My head was spinning. Life was bizarre. You could know someone for years it seemed, and still not really know what made them tick. Jeremy was still the person I’d known all my life, but he was also a stranger, with a whole other life I couldn’t begin to imagine. That started me thinking about Felix. Is that how it was with him as well, was I the underside, the secret part of his life, known to his friends and family as one of his students? Was that how it was for Jana as well, a whole other life in some far-off galaxy, a life everyone thought was merely a delusion? Off the planet. I smiled grimly. Off the planet literally, apparently. And Brodie? Where did he fit? Well, Jana wasn’t communicating any longer and Brodie had disappeared, so I’d probably never know the answer to that one.
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HEATHER J e remy had always been a good listener, and I found myself spilling out my worries on the drive down to the bay. I was careful the way I told him about Felix, and, when he didn’t comment, I enquired anxiously what he was thinking. ‘The jury is considering its verdict,’ was all he would say. From the number of cobwebs we had to fight our way through I’d say we were the first to visit the boatshed in ages. We uncovered the canoe and as we carefully examined the hull for cracks, Jeremy whistled tunelessly all the while. ‘Just as well Tristan’s the musical director, not you,’ I teased and he made out he was deeply hurt, although a moment later he started up again, the same boring nothing-tune. Finally he pronounced the canoe seaworthy. We zipped up our 161
life jackets and loaded the paddles and day packs. It was a great afternoon, cloudy and cool with a light headwind. Ideal canoeing weather. We ended up paddling right round the point to Beachcliff and back. As we dipped and pulled and the banks quietly slipped by and the seagulls wheeled overhead, I realised it was ages since I’d enjoyed myself in such an uncomplicated way. I was so tired by the time we got back to the boatshed, I could hardly lift my end of the canoe out of the water. And I was starving. ‘ C o ffee?’ Jeremy asked, when we’d safely stowed the canoe and locked the boatshed. ‘Food!’ I demanded. ‘I’m ravenous!’ ‘So, love hasn’t destroyed your appetite, infant,’ Jeremy teased. The magic of the river suddenly evaporated and the familiar restlessness rushed back. The p roblems with my re s e a rch; the doubts I was beginning to have about becoming a psychologist; but mostly, worrying how things would work out for Felix and me. A whole lot of things tangled up together in a snarled-up knot. The trouble was I didn’t have the faintest idea how to start untangling it. I should use some of the techniques I employed with clients. Funny how other people’s problems always seem easier to solve than your own. Al Fresco, an Italian cafe in one of the converted warehouses down by the wharf, had the best cappuccinos in town. If you were prepared to risk the weather and sit out in the courtyard you could be reasonably private. We ordered a large pizza, half 162
artichoke and asparagus and the other half calamari, anchovies and prawns. The artichoke and asparagus for Jere m y. He always did have weird tastes. How anyone can pass up seafood is beyond me. We carried our cups out and found a table at the far end, against the sandstone wall. As we sipped our coffee in comfortable silence I found myself thinking, if only I’d fallen in love with Jer e m y, things would have been much simpler. At least, before Tristan came on the scene, that is. ‘Tell me how you met Tristan,’ I said, breaking the silence at last. ‘The last time I heard, you were climbing the Himalayas.’ Jeremy laughed. ‘So when I got back to London, and found I’d been deserted by my childhood sweetheart, without so much as a word, what else was there to do but take solace in the arms of another?’ ‘And it had to be a man?’ I retorted, perhaps more tartly than I’d intended. Jeremy looked thoughtful. ‘So that’s the rub, is it,’ he said at last. ‘Yo u weren’t ready to take up your options, but you resent being ousted by a pommy poofter.’ I laughed, in spite of myself. You couldn’t get away with anything with this man. He just wasn’t scared of the truth, no matter how unpalatable. ‘You’re the one who ought to be the psychologist, not me,’ I said. ‘But you’re right, I suppose. Everybody assumed we’d end up together. Perhaps I did too, without realising it.’ I blushed. What if he thought I was coming on 163
to him? The waiter came with our pizza, then, thank goodness. As we munched away, Jeremy explained how he’d met Tristan while working on a theatre project for inner-city kids. He’d known Tristan was gay, but Tristan hadn’t made a move because he wasn’t sure about Jeremy. ‘I suppose it could have gone either way, ’ Jeremy admitted, laughing, ‘not that I’d want you to tell Tris that!’ I thought about that for a while. ‘So when did you know for sure?’ ‘That I was in love with Tristan, or that I was gay?’ ‘Both I suppose.’ Jeremy reached over and took both my hands in his. His hands felt warm and strong and smelled of mozzarella and artichokes and tomato paste. ‘ H e a t h e r, believe me, if I’d been that way inclined, you’d have been my number one choice. You know that don’t you?’ Stupidly, my eyes filled with tears. What was it with me? One guy who’d rather have another guy than me, and another who marries some bimbo, and keeps stringing me along, throwing me the occasional kind word as if to a stray puppy. So of course, I got the lecture about Felix. How he was just using me. How I was wasting my time mooning around. How Felix was so full of it, surely I could see that, and that if he was worth anything, he’d play straight and not keep me hanging about endlessly. ‘This way he doesn’t have to do anything, infant. You make it too easy for him. You ought to be really pissed off.’ 164
That was a startling thought. It had never occurred to me to get angry. ‘Anyway,’ Jeremy continued, ‘let’s not spoil a good afternoon talking about low life like Felix. Tell me a bit more about your work. How is your case study going?’ ‘You know I’m bound by ethics not to talk about clients.’ ‘Of course,’ he agreed, ‘I meant generally. No specifics.’ ‘That’s the problem,‘ I said. ‘This is nothing but specifics.’ ‘Try me.’ I wrestled with my conscience, trying to work out a way I could give the general impression of the difficulties I was facing with Jana. There was no way. By breaking Jana’s confidence, enlisting Jeremy’s help, I’d be going against the ethics of my profession. But what if Jeremy was able to come up with some insight that could help break the impasse? Would the means justify the end? I was on slippery ground and I knew it. I took a deep breath and began to tell him the story. When I’d finished, Jeremy whistled. ‘It’d make a great play.’ I looked at him suspiciously. ‘No, seriously,’ he said, seeing the expression on my face, ‘I mean it. It’s got everything, mystery, drama, suspense, tragedy, the lot. And the choral effects, chanting and so on, could be quite stunning.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked apprehensively. Jeremy reached across the debris of our pizza, and grabbed my hands. 165
‘Don’t you see? Nobody believes her. They say it’s all in her mind. So what if we take it out of her mind and put it on the stage? Can’t you just see her name in lights: Jana Kestrel, Heroine, InterGalactic Space and Time Traveller!’ ‘And a nice piece of work for your boyfriend, I suppose?’ Jeremy looked startled for a moment, then he laughed merrily. ‘Hanging out with Felix hasn’t done much for your health and temper, infant.’ I blushed. ‘But you’re right, Tris would be rapt in something like this. He’s worked on drama projects in therapeutic communities before.’ ‘You’d hardly call Third East a therapeutic community.’ ‘No, but …’ Jeremy grabbed hold of my hands again. ‘Quit being the tragic heroine for a moment, and think about the possibilities for Jana. You say Jana has stopped talking to you since Br o d i e pissed off, and she’s already tried to kill herself once, so she’s pretty much on the edge anyway. Perhaps seeing the whole story played out before her would give her some sort of a hold on life, at least make her feel somebody finds her story worthwhile …’ ‘But that’s the point,’ I interrupted. ‘I don’t know the whole story.’ ‘For a psych case study maybe,’ Jeremy replied. ‘But there’s enough to make damn good theatre. Anyway, it’d be a good alternative to occupational therapy. I bet it’s the usual boring bead work and raffia and stuff?’ 166
I nodded. ‘Anything’s an improvement on that.’ Jeremy blushed. ‘And, whatever you all think of Tristan, he’s pretty good at what he does. Why do you think they got him to come from England to direct the opera? And why do you think it’s going to get rave reviews?’ ‘I’m not saying it’ll be no good,’ I argued, ‘but we’re talking about the Mordland psych ward, not the Theatre Royal or the Sydney Opera House.’ We both got a bit emotional then, me about betraying Jana’s trust, and going against my professional ethics, and Jeremy about Tr i s t a n ’ s brilliance. The upshot was, I agreed to ask Jana for permission to show Jeremy the notes I’d made during our sessions, and to speak with CraigieFern and Felix about the possibility of Jana and other Third East patients participating in a community theatre project. Jeremy said he and Tristan would talk to Community Health and Arts bodies in Mordland about funding. And that’s how the first ever Third East musical drama, Jana the Quester, was born. It was months later, and after plenty of hassles, that Tristan and a selected group of volunteer theatre workers, Third East outpatients, and one or two inpatients, began work on the play. Curiously, Craigie-Fern supported the whole idea f rom the beginning, and had only lectured me mildly about breaking client confidentiality. Prof B remer was also supportive, but Felix seemed strangely put out. Although she’d given permission to dramatise her story, it was hard work getting Jana involved. 167
At first she just sat silently through the sessions, while Tristan and the group worked on the script and did various theatre exercises. But finally she started to come out of her shell, and occasionally ventured a remark. No, it wasn’t like that at all. Yes, they’d got it right there. She even volunteered information once or twice. She never mentioned Brodie’s name though, and I wondered if she’d forgotten him. I had to hand it to Tristan. He was good. How he ever got a coherent script out of the apparently directionless talking that went on a lot of the time, beats me. But he did. And when he got hold of a lot of musical instruments for people to experiment with, and the score began to emerge from the chaos, I was even more astounded. Under his guidance the choral sequences, which comprised the Song Cycles of the Heroines, began to emerge. The occupational therapist, who could have felt put out at having her space co-opted, cheerfully helped construct sets. She also put Tristan in touch with a local choir that had grown out of a self-help group for former Third East patients. They certainly gave volume and enthusiasm to the rehearsals, if not finesse. I took Jana to the rehearsal, and while she refused to look directly at either the choir or the actors, sometimes tears ran down her face, or her whole body strained f o r w a rd as though trying desperately to catch something just out of earshot. The breakthrough came the day the lead singer began rehearsing his role of Chief Chanter, Fenna. As Jana had refused to reveal the actual words, 168
Tristan had had a couple of songs translated into ancient Greek, in order to convey a sense of mystery to the audience. ‘No, no!’ A command rang out suddenly. Jana waved the singer away, and began in a curious monotone to recite strings of unknown syllables in a haunting and hypnotic chant. That it was a song there was no doubt, but it was unlike any other song I’d ever heard. And yet, at the same time, it reminded me of Buddhist chanting, of plainsong, of the recitation of the Koran. The nasal chanting of the sacred rites of a thousand cultures. The song suddenly faltered and ground into silence as Jana slumped back in her chair. No one moved. The song hung in the air. At last Tristan came very slowly and quietly towards her. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. Late one afternoon, just as I was getting ready to take her back to the hospital, Jana began to speak quietly and urgently to Tristan. ‘You, too, know what it is to love greatly.’ Tristan’s fish eyes blinked, and a pulse began to beat in his forehead. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly, and placed one arm around Jeremy’s waist. Jana began to speak passionately then about whole episodes she had not revealed to me. About the one with whom she was heart-linked, with whom she had conceived and birthed a child against the express orders of the Controllers. And of how, in order to protect the child, she and Ela fled to the Contaminated Territories of the Tribes, where Ela and the child still lived in exile whilst 169
Jana continued her quest. Jaenife, the child was called, ‘white wave’, named for Jana’s quest. For the mystery that had dazzled her for so long. ‘The waterfall,’ I said. It was all starting to fit together. ‘The white wave,’ Jana said, and sighed. ‘I came t h rough it but still found no place for the Journeyings of the Heroines to be celebrated.’ ‘Oh, but there is,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘Tristan will make it happen. I promise.’ ‘These chanters are strangers,’ Jana re p l i e d , ‘they have not been taught the Song Cycles.’ ‘Perhaps you could teach them,’ Jeremy said. ‘If Fenna were here,’ she began, ‘but it’s no use. He does not know me any longer.’ She stopped abruptly, such a look of horror on her face that the hairs on my neck stood up. ‘What is it?’ I gasped. She had dropped her head into her hands and begun to rock backwards and forwards, moaning and weeping. ‘Mind renewal! That must be it! I had not imagined anything so terrible. It’s the only thing powerful enough to break the link.’ Whatever mind renewal was, it must be pretty horrible, from the stricken expression on Jana’s face. Jeremy tried to soothe her. ‘You don’t know that for sure.’ ‘Then why can he no longer mind-link with me? Why has he deserted me?’ Fenna or not, I gladly could have kicked Brodie McPherson the length of the rehearsal room at that moment. Somehow we got Jana calmed down, and back to the ward. The charge sister, who had shown not 170
the slightest enthusiasm when we had begun to break through Jana’s world of silence, pounced the moment she saw Jana’s distress. ‘Whatever you’ve been up to,’ she remarked grimly, ‘it doesn’t look like it’s doing her a whole lot of good.’ I could barely contain my rage. Didn’t she realise what an achievement it had been, for Jana and for all of us? And all she could do was criticise. A little bit of encouragement wouldn’t have gone astray. Of course I said nothing. Too well brought up to tell the sour-faced old prune what I thought of her. I saved my ranting and raving for Jeremy and Tristan in the coffee shop that night. ‘Come on, infant,’ Jeremy said, when I paused for breath, ‘you can hardly expect people to take kindly to having their fixed ideas about reality challenged.’ Something in the dispirited way he said that made me drag myself out of my own miseries to ask how things were with his parents. Well, he had committed the unforgivable sin, he joked, a bit unconvincingly, and as far as his mother and father were concerned there’d be no fatted calf killed for this prodigal son. Why did things have to be so complicated? Surely Mr and Mrs French could see that Tristan and Jeremy loved one other. Wasn’t that the most important thing when you really got down to it? Perhaps it wasn’t. Loving someone didn’t necessarily mean living happily ever after. What about Jana and Ela, or Brodie McPherson and his girlfriend? Or me and Felix for that matter. Felix doesn’t love you in the same way Jana loves Ela, or Brodie McPherson loved Geraldine Finch came 171
the traitorous thought. I brushed it away. It was just that Felix had a lot of pressures on him at the moment, but he loved me, there was no doubt of that. Maybe his love wasn’t as desperate as B rodie’s, or as heroic as Jana’s, but at least we lived in the same galaxy and could be with one another whenever we chose. Well, whenever he chose, if I was to be really honest about it. The thought shocked me. And, somewhere deep inside me a tiny pale metal-coloured flame of rage flicked into life. I knew without acknowledging it to myself, that should I ever choose to fan that flame, it could easily flare up and burn my bright, fragile dream of love to ashes. As far as Felix was concerned I’d made my decision long ago. Maybe I should give him an ultimatum. But then, if he dropped me, if I never felt his arms around me again, I would die. I wasn’t willing to risk it.
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BRODIE As I walked out of Third East for the second time that week, I knew that this time I’d get away for sure, and stay away. To put distance between me and Mordland, that’s all I wanted. And maybe outrun the voices. I figured the hospital wouldn’t send anyone after me. I had been a voluntary patient, and Mum and Dad wouldn’t do anything as nerdish as getting the cops to look for me. On the road you can kill time a thousand ways: swapping jokes with truckies, listening in to them yarning on the CB with their mates, singing along to endless country and western tracks, or just staring at poles as they flashed past. Every time I was asked where I was from, or where I was heading, I made up a different story. The ache for Gerra never let up. 173
Freshwater Creek is where I stopped running. Riverview Caravan Park, about five ks from where I worked picking oranges. Riverview, that was a laugh. Dusty gum trees and clapped out vans was the only view you got from the park. Not that you were missing much. I’d made the trip to the river once, along a track littered with cigarette butts, beer cans and condoms, to where tree roots clawed the empty air as the bank dropped away to a scummy channel of yellow water. It might have been a freshwater creek in the days of the horse and buggy, but it was a stinking drain now. Monday to Saturday I picked, Saturday nights I spent in the pub, playing pool and arguing about which was the worst fruit to pick. Grapes got my vote. Nearly got sunstroke in a vineyard at Treeton. Must have been 45 degrees every day for weeks. I’d lost kilos in sweat and just about did my hands in. Sunday I slept, or washed my clothes, or watched an old black and white telly in my van, or lay on my bed smoking. Old songs, bits of conversations, school stuff, irrelevant crap floated through my brain sometimes, but a lot of the time it was blank, zombied out. Nothing made sense. Like two ants I watched one night trying to haul away a bit of pie crust twice their size. Half an hour they struggled. I could have ended it for them with one stomp of my Blunny. ‘You puking or praying?’ I looked up past dusty steel caps, torn Levis, tattooed bulging biceps and black t-shirt with its sleeves ripped out, into a mocking stubbled face. I 174
felt like a nerd. ‘Just watching these ants.’ ‘Yeah?’ I scrambled to my feet as he shoved a paw at me. ‘Bru. Short for Bruiser. Dunno why they call me that.’ He shouted with laughter and pumped my hand enthusiastically. ‘Just cruised in. Got the van next door. Thought you might like to sink a few, since we’re neighbours.’ He nodded towards his van, past a ’78 Falcon, purple in the parts the rust hadn’t invaded. A rubber skeleton dangled from the r e a r- v i e w mirror. Time warp! A skinny blond girl was busy hauling out bags and boxes. She looked up and smiled but kept on working. ‘Me chick, Gaylene.’ She was the thinnest person I’d ever seen. Her c u t - o ff denim shorts and midriff top made her look like a little girl. Skinny shoulder blades poking out of the ribbed material of her top, and her stick legs like a kid in primary school. ‘Get us a drink will ya, darl,’ Bru called over his shoulder, charging up the metal step into his van and beckoning me to follow. Their van was as crappy as mine. Gaylene unloaded an armful of s t u ff onto the bed, fossicked in the fridge and handed us out a couple of VBs. ‘Get into it,’ Bru roared. We sat there drinking while Gaylene put stuff away. Gerra wouldn’t have put up with that for a minute. I couldn’t keep up with Bru, and by the time I made it back to my van hours later, I was 175
majorly pissed. A crazy movie started to weave itself in my brain about Bru really being a monster, Gaylene his slave. He had some hold over her, maybe he murdered her sister or something, and she found out. And he forced her to come along as a hostage and she was waiting for someone to rescue her. Enter Brodie, Superhero. Get real, the voices snarled, you wouldn’t have the guts. Face it, you’re a loser. You’re nothing. And when I staggered out for a piss in the grey dawn and saw Bru and Gaylene sitting side by side on the steps of their van, having the first cigarette of the day, I mumbled an embarrassed hi, and headed for the shower block.
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BRODIE Wouldn’t you know it. She must have rung every caravan park in the country to find me. And how’d she guess I’d be in a park anyway? Mothers’ intuition? Jock was standing at the door of the kiosk, a smirk on his face, when the truck dropped me back that night. ‘Message for you.’ ‘Yeah?’ He scratched his fat belly. ‘Thought you said you had no family?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Musta been a ghost that phoned then. She said she was your mother.’ I started to walk away. ‘Look mate …’ His greasy paw was on my shoulder. I shrugged him off, kept moving. He called after me, ‘Police is one thing. I’d 177
never dob anyone in to them. They ask, I never seen you. But someone’s mother, that’s diff e rent.’ I ignored him. Jammed the key into the shonky lock and jerked the van door open. A wave of stale air hit me. The van was like a sauna as usual. Any day now for the air-con, Jock had been saying for weeks. Home Sweet Home. Buckled aluminium fittings, tatty contact peeling off the shelves and cupboards, and one side of the bed propped up on bricks. But at least it was mine. I could shut the door, if I wanted to fry, and tell the whole world to shove it. I dumped my bag and reached into the fridge for a cold one. ‘I wrote it down.’ It was Jock again, his big ugly moon face poking through my door. Only one way to get rid of him. ‘Hand it over then.’ His mouth opened like a fish, surprised by my sudden change of heart. ‘It’s none of my business, but …’ ‘You said it.’ ‘Look, just let her know you’re okay, will you.’ I nodded. Just give me the note and get out of here, nerd. Still he didn’t move. ‘They worry, mothers, you know. ’ I spat it then. ‘Are you going to give me the note, or stand there making speeches about the virtues of mothers for the rest of the night?’ He reached into the back pocket of his shorts and hauled out a scrap of paper. 178
‘Shut the flywire when you go,’ I snarled, crumpling the paper in my hand. ‘Can’t make you young fellows out,’ he muttered, as he trundled back to the kiosk. ‘Good homes, families that care about them, dunno what it is with kids today …’ He’d have made a good mate for Dad. The message was short, considering the months of silence. I suppose she was embarrassed talking to a stranger and admitting she didn’t know where to find her own son. Just the phone number (did she think I’d forgotten it?), and her and Dad’s love, and would I ring and let her know how I was, reverse charges would be fine. I tossed and turned all night, trying to make up my mind whether to ignore the message, but in the morning, minutes before the truck came to pick us up, I dashed into the kiosk, grabbed a postcard, scribbled a few sentences on the back and dropped it into the post box before I could change my mind. Dear Mum, don’t worry, I’m okay. I got a job picking. I’ll be in touch. Look after yourself. B. It was the best I could come up with. I hauled myself into the truck, and for once I was pleased to have the sun boring down on my head all day, frying my brains. Glad to concentrate on my torn and stinging arms, my sore shoulders, and the image behind my eyes of oranges, hundreds of thousands of them, rolling into bins. Because it 179
blocked out the thought of that scruffy postcard, and its grudging message. I imagined Mum snatching the card out of the letter box and her face falling when she read it. She’d just go back inside and get on with her housework, not showing anything outwardly, but with her heart hurting and hurting. I could at least have put ‘love from Brodie,’ it wouldn’t have killed me. But I hadn’t. It was as though I was being held apart from ordinary life and normal feelings. I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t go forward. I was stuck. Waiting. What for I had no idea.
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BRODIE It was freaky the way Atlas suddenly turned up out of nowhere. I jumped down off the truck one night and there he was, lounging against the coke machine outside the kiosk, fag in his hand, backpack and nifty new Akubra on the veranda beside him. ‘Howzit going, animal?’ he drawled, as if it was yesterday, not nearly two years ago, we last saw each other. Gaylene let out a wolf whistle, and Atlas grinned and flexed his biceps, casually flicking his fag-end into the dust. Same old Atlas. ‘Gunna introduce us to your mate,’ Bru said, ‘or are you just gunna stand there catching flies?’ ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked Atlas. He laughed. ‘Good to see you too, mate. Don’t o v e rdo the welcome.’ He turned to Bru and 181
Gaylene. ‘Howzit going?’ Nodded towards me. ‘The spun-out dude is my good friend and exflatmate Brodie McPherson. Don’t mind him.’ They all laughed. ‘You staying?’ I asked. ‘Am I invited?’ He grinned. I grinned back. ‘Come on, bring your flash gear over.’ ‘That’ll be ten bucks a night extra,’ Jock said, puffing after us, ‘I’m not running a charity, you know.’ ‘No?’ Atlas drawled and we grinned at each other again. I was glad to see him, I discovered to my surprise. Gaylene said I’d better not plan on keeping such a spunk to myself, and Atlas said just what did she have in mind. She disappeared inside and a millisecond later came out with a six pack, and a jumbo bag of salt and vinegar chips. We munched away for a while, tinnies in hand, while the mongrel dogs of the district sang their mournful songs, and a scrambled mix of TV g u n f i re and canned laughter began to stutter through the park. ‘Bit of a dump, isn’t it?’ Atlas said. ‘Watch it mate,’ Bru grinned, ‘Gaylene and me were born and bred not far from here.’ ‘A good reason for pissing off out of the place I’d say.’ ‘Three days mate, and we’re out of here,’ Bru said, ‘soon as the oranges cut out.’ ‘Where are you from then?’ Gaylene piped up, in her little girl voice. Atlas flexed his muscles and did an imaginary karate chop. ‘Same as him,’ and nodded towards me. 182
‘Which is?’ Gaylene persisted. ‘Mordland. Didn’t dickhead here even tell you that?’ ‘We didn’t ask,’ Bru joked. ‘We figured he was on the run. Drugs, GBH, axe murder at least.’ Funny. But not so far from the truth, and embarrassingly close to the crap I’d invented about him. ‘What’s there to know about Mordland?’ I m u t t e red, trying to cover my embarrassment. ‘Hole of a place.’ Cool it, Atlas. I like the way things stand between me and Bru and Gaylene. I mind my own business and they ask no awkward questions, at least they didn’t until you got here, meathead. In a few days time we’ll say goodbye and probably never see each other again and that’s the way I want it. Nothing complicated. Except any minute from now you’ll probably start telling them my life story. Atlas was flat out swapping jokes with Bru and flirting with Gaylene, no chance to ask him why he’d come. I wanted to run. I cursed myself for letting the beginnings of a friendship happen between Bru and Gaylene and me. The only safe way was on my own. After a few more drinks I said I was going to bed. They hardly paused to call good night. Hours later, Atlas clumped into my van and tossed his sleeping bag on the spare bunk. His boots clunked onto the floor and in two seconds flat he was snoring his head off. I lay there listening to him, trying to figure out why he’d come. So far he hadn’t hassled me out, or said anything about Gerra or Brad or given me 183
any messages from Mum and Dad. He just cruised up out of nowhere, his usual smart arse self. But he must have talked to Mum and Dad or how would he have known where to find me? He’d be too dumb to work it out on his own. The voices o ff e red a few theories, so way out I told them bullshit, it’s Atlas we’re talking about, not an ASIO agent. I wasn’t about to admit how I was getting off on listening to his gross snores, and watching him flop over and over, tangling himself up in the sleeping bag. But when I finally dozed off, I had the best sleep in about six hundred years. In my dream the voices had bodies, and even though I couldn’t see them, they pushed and shoved at me, screaming and squawking like a heavy metal band out of sync. Suddenly a new voice entered the chorus, one I hadn’t heard b e f o re. You must listen, it said. Listen past the voices. Whaddya mean? I dunno, I answer myself, it just came into my head. But it calmed me. Weird. Next thing I knew Bru was bashing on the door yelling at me to move it, the truck’d be there in about five seconds. I fell out of bed and dragged my clothes on, tumbled my crib into my bag and stumbled down the step. ‘See ya,’ Atlas mumbled through layers of down. ‘Enjoy your sleep, slob.’ ‘Eat your heart out, slave,’ he mocked, sleepily. ‘See you when you get back from the salt mines.’ Atlas greeted me enthusiastically when I got back that night. ‘There are some ace caves not far away from here, Jock reckons. Bracelet Caves, 184
they’re called. We oughta check them out, ay?’ ‘What for?’ ‘Not a lot else to do round these parts.’ He was not wrong. I asked Bru and Gaylene if they’d been to the caves. ‘Not for years,’ Gaylene admitted, ‘they’re pretty spooky. You can get lost as easy as.’ So then she and Bru started on a whole heap of gruesome stories about people lost in there for years who ended up piles of bones. And murderers who took hostages and held off the police for months, that sort of stuff. ‘No shit,’ Atlas said. ‘What’d they survive on? Corpses of the lost dudes?’ Nothing would dent his enthusiasm. In the end, it was easier to give in than argue. Anyway, it’d be something to do. Atlas hadn’t said how long he was planning to stay, and I wasn’t keen to leave any empty spaces for us to get talking about the past. Monday I collected my money, and the next day we hitched a lift into Freshwater Creek with B ru and Gaylene to stock up on supplies. We bought a bunch of tins and packets and a few tired looking vegetables. No oranges, I never wanted to see another orange in my life. A torch and half a dozen balls of string from the hardware shop, that was about it. Then we went down to the BP for a h a m b u rger and chips. Bru and Gaylene were ready to take off, it was a couple of hours’ drive on dirt roads to Gaylene’s old man’s place — their first stop. ‘Take it easy, mate,’ Bru shouted as he spun the wheels in the main street and took off in a cloud of 185
dust. I waved and Gaylene waved back and kept on waving till they were out of sight. I’d miss them, I discovered suddenly. I went a few rounds with the voices before I found myself admitting this out loud, to Atlas. ‘ Yeah, they seem pretty cool,’ Atlas re p l i e d , ‘especially Gaylene.’ ‘Animal.’ Atlas laughed. It was almost like old times. We’d better watch our step Jock warned, the caves were a maze of tunnels and underground waterways. Easy enough to lose your way. That’s why we got the string, we told him. ‘String,’ he sniffed. ‘That’s kids’ stuff. Yo u ’ l l need more than string if you get lost in there, let me tell you.’ It was scruffy uninteresting countryside to the foothills. We made good time. Atlas was as strong as a bull of course, devoted to his gorgeous body as he is, and I was a lot fitter than when I was sitting behind a desk all day. It was the one plus, from all those crappy months of picking. I was able to match Atlas’ pace, which pleased me to the max. Careful, I warned myself, you want iceman Brodie to melt? But you’d have to be the walking dead to pretend it wasn’t pretty cool shuff l i n g along a bush track with an old mate, at the start of a camping trip, instead of killing time in front of zombie TV shows, or being stuck up a ladder picking oranges.
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BRODIE We spent a couple of days mucking about exploring the outer caves, before we decided to try out one of the tunnels leading off into who knew w h e re. We crept along in the semi-darkness, saving the torch for later, and remembering Jock’s warnings, we took note of markings and clues to the way back. We didn’t want to start using the string till we had to. Every now and again Atlas picked up a pebble and tossed it into the darkness in front of us. You listen for the pebble landing, that way you don’t step off into empty space, he told me. He’d seen it on a caving program on TV. When we turned on the torch it got r e a l l y spooky. The circle of light bobbed off the walls and made weird shadows. We came to a place where the passage divided. Time to get out the string. We tied one end to a shaft of rock slanting up from the 187
uneven floor of the passage, and groped our way along, tripping every now and again, and for some reason, whispering. The hollow sound of our voices hissing back at us was freaky. A bit further along, Atlas bent and tossed another stone. This time it was about a year before we heard anything, then from somewhere below came the plunk of a stone landing in water. We crept forward and suddenly we were in a Disney fairytale. A cave so huge, the torch beam didn’t reach the roof. The floor sloped steeply down and in the narrow strip of torchlight we glimpsed black evil water below. We flashed the torch around. Everywhere the beam landed we caught snatches of stalactites and stalagmites, like witches’ fingers, like chur c h steeples, hanging from the walls, rising up from the floor. ‘Awesome,’ Atlas whispered. We edged our way down, down, down, over the tumbled rocks, till we reached the gritty bank of the silent river. It was even more off - t h e - s h o w down there. ‘Let’s stay here tonight,’ Atlas whisp e red, after we’d crept about for a while, exploring. ‘You mean sleep … right here?’ Atlas grinned. ‘Sure.’ His smile looked pretty freaky in the torchlight. What happens, happens, I decided suddenly. ‘Okay.’ In a weird sort of way, although it was so creepy down here, it felt okay as well. It was quiet and dark and it made everything I’d been trying to forget seem far away. 188
‘Let’s get our gear,’ Atlas said, so we scrambled back up the slope like two excited kids in an a d v e n t u re playground. There were a few tense moments while we scrabbled around looking for where we tied the string, while the torch threw confusing shadows everywhere. It finally showed up, wedged behind a jagged ledge, right where we’d left it. We kidded each other that we’d known it was there all the time. I went in front this time, carrying the torch, while Atlas reeled in the string. As soon as the pitch blackness started to give way to the grey half light, I turned off the torch. We sprinted the last few metres to the large chamber where our backpacks were waiting, and flopped down among the animal droppings. I reached into my Bluey pocket for my Drum and papers while Atlas whooped about, bouncing off the walls, shouting, ‘Hyper-reality, that’s what this is man, hyper-reality!’ Tripper. My hands shook as I rolled a cigarette. Now we were back in the daylight I was not so keen on going back down again. Wimp, I told myself. We ’ re too far south for crocodiles, and what’s so scary about spiders, bats at worst. Snakes? What would there be for them to eat down there? Well, we’d know soon enough. When we finally made it back to the underground stream, not having met any snakes or bats or spiders on the way down, we climbed straight into our sleeping bags. We’d freeze otherwise, we told each other, but really it was because we were a bit spun out by the place. Atlas lit a candle while I put a billy of water on the primus. 189
While we sipped our scalding coffee, we speculated about how long it would take a stalactite to form, drop by drop. We talked about squash and football and Atlas’ favourite subject, body building. Eventually we ran out of stuff to talk about so we just lay there, looking past the dancing shadows of the candle, into the dark. The voices warned me that any minute Atlas’d get stuck into me and start telling me what he really thought of me. I let them rave for a while, then suddenly the thought of Atlas getting up on his soap box and making a speech struck me as really funny, and I snorted with laughter. ‘What’s the joke?’ Atlas muttered sleepily. ‘Nothing much.’ ‘Oh, top dollar.’ Seconds later his snores rang out through the echoing darkness. It was amazing the way Atlas could drop asleep. I lay awake for a while, arguing with the voices. You’ve got the wrong guy this time, I told them, Atlas never gets into a rave, unless it’s about girls or body building, so you can just shut it. Get off my case. Okay, so I still don’t know why he’s come looking for me, maybe he just wants to catch up with me, like he said. A clamour of voices at that, shrill and sarcastic, but among them one steadier, quieter than the rest. He is your friend. Trust that. It was the under-voice, the one I heard the night Atlas turned up. And although it was quieter than the other voices, they were momentarily silenced by it. Thoughts slipped in. Clearly and logically, and not out of the anguish that had eaten away at 190
me for so long. Atlas is no social worker, he’s as much on himself as anyone else. He can’t think past heavy metal, or body building, or scoring with the chicks. And he’s a slob. But a friend. A good friend. What about him bringing Brad into the hospital, and later, when I was such an arsehole, still hanging out with me and acting as though everything was normal. I did a fair bit of thinking, then slept at last. I woke abruptly. The darkness was palpable. I could see nothing. A low rumble came out of the silence. Some great powerful beast breathing close and menacingly, pressing the black air into a stranglehold around me. ‘Atlas!’ I hissed. ‘Wake up! We gotta get the hell out of here!’ Atlas snored on, undisturbed. Earth tre m o r ? Avalanche? Monster? The earth breathing, the under-voice whispered. Heart thumping, I struggled out of my sleeping bag to shake Atlas awake. Be still, the voice said, there is no danger. I fumbled for the torch, and clicked it on. Flashed the beam around the cavern. Nothing. I strained my ears for an approaching beast, but the only sound was Atlas’ snoring. And, the weird low rumble that had woken me. My heart was thumping, everything in me screaming: Get the hell outa here! I couldn’t move. The sound had me pinned down. I’d never heard anything like it in my life before. The rocks are singing, the under-voice said. Listen. 191
In spite of my panic I began to detect rhythms, and the more I listened, it did seem like some sort of song. Subtle harmonies joined the original rumbling, liquid notes hummed in the air. Weird. What was it? The wind? But there wasn’t any wind. Some secret Aboriginal ceremony? Then where were the singers? I lay there in the dark with this weird song making electric currents through my body. My hair was standing on end for sure. It was creepy, the loneliest sound I’d ever heard in my life. But not a loneliness that hurt. It was old, something that stretched back into forever, that knew everything. And, whether it was the earth singing, an approaching avalanche or the spirits of olden day tribes chanting their ceremonies, or, whether it was my own mind looping through space, it was the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard. It drew me inside it, and freed me at the same time. Mum would call it grace.
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BRODIE The next day Atlas and I took the torch and picked our way along the bank of the under g ro u n d stream for a couple of ks. It was freaky, but excellent. I didn’t say anything about the night before. Atlas would think I’d really lost it. Especially as I also had the weird thought that it had only happened because Atlas had been there, even though he’d snored through the whole performance. It was unreal down there underground. And when we finally made it back to the entrance cave and stumbled out into the daylight hours later, I felt sort of shy and exposed. As if I’d lost a skin. Even Atlas didn’t seem quite his usual full-on self, and neither of us felt like going straight back to the park. We decided to camp in the entrance cave one more night. 193
As we were lying by our fire, looking out at the sky full of stars, he said, ‘I think those cavemen might have got it right.’ ‘You’re not wrong,’ I agreed. Weird to think of other people lighting a fire in this exact spot trillions of years ago, and lying here looking out at the same sky, maybe thinking the same sort of shit as us. Time’s a weird thing. Space is too. What if they both looped round and met themselves coming the other way? Maybe that’s how it was for Gerra, and she’d come back laughing one day through empty space. Would I even know her if she did? I wondered. You’d be different, you’d have to be, after being dead. You wouldn’t just say, ‘Hi, it’s me, I’m back,’ and everything just go back the way it used to be. Or maybe you’d be the same and it’d be other people that were different. The thought of Gerra coming back, and me not even knowing, twisted in my gut like a knife. But before the voices could get going, the memory of that quiet low song in the earth’s belly rose inside me, and started to change the pain into something different. As I strained after the memory of that song, instead of getting pissed off, and guilty, and breaking to pieces, like I had every time I thought of Gerra, the feelings melted together to make one long low note of sorrow. It swelled and swelled till I dissolved right into it, but it didn’t destroy me, it just bore me along in the dark, like that black oily underground river we’d spent the night sleeping beside. A hand on my arm. A quiet voice. ‘Yeah man, I know. It’s a bum deal.’ 194
I wiped my eyes. Hadn’t even known the tears were falling. I felt awkward. Shy. Atlas reached for the rollies and held them out. ‘Fag?’ ‘Thanks.’ Even then he didn’t get stuck into me. Just sat and smoked and looked down over the valley into the darkness. He’d never been big on words, and I guess if he’d wanted to have a go at me, he’d have done it long before. I let my breath out, cautiously, fully, then drew the smoke deep into my lungs. ‘Brad would have liked it here,’ I said. Somehow it was as close as I could get to naming the losses. Atlas chuckled. ‘Sudden death to all possums within barking distance!’ That was it. That’s all he said. We sprawled there for hours, smoking, poking branches into the fire and watching the flames flicker, peering out into the night once in a while. I caught a whiff of some feeling I couldn’t name. It took me ages to get what it was. Gratitude. I practically died of surprise. Back at the caravan next day, Atlas packed his stuff and slung his backpack up onto his shoulder. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said. ‘Gotta get back to work.’ ‘Yeah, catch you.’ I kept my voice casual so he wouldn’t realise how much I wanted him to stay. I never would have admitted it of course, I’d become too good at hiding my feelings, and I was still a bit edgy about what had happened up at the caves. The stupid thing was, if I’d just come right 195
out and said, Stay a few more days mate, he’d probably have said, Cool, and dumped his pack back in the van. Atlas doesn’t go in for mind trips. ‘I’ll tell your Mum I caught up with ya!’ he called back over his shoulder. He was getting a lift into Freshwater Creek with the delivery truck and the guy had blown the horn half a dozen times already. ‘Hey, Atlas!’ He stopped and turned round. The bloke in the truck yelled out that he better pull his finger out if he was coming. ‘Yeah man.’ ‘Hey,’ I said, hurrying along the path. ‘It was great. In the caves I mean.’ He looked at me for a minute as if he was trying to make up his mind about something, but in the end he said, ‘Sure was,’ then hoisted himself into the cabin of the truck. As it took off he leaned out the window and yelled, ‘See you back home, ay?’ I didn’t have the heart even for TV. I moped about for a while, drank the last few tinnies, then started to sort out my gear ready to move on. The folder with Jana’s story in it was still in the bottom of my bag, a bit the worse for wear by now. I took it out and tossed it on the bed. I pr o b a b l y wouldn’t have started reading it even then, except I knew that if I didn’t find something to fill my mind, the voices would start up again.
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BRODIE You might say it’s because I heard rocks singing, or because a friend travelled halfway across the country to find me, or perhaps it’s just that time changes things, like people tell you, but I felt diff e rent about reading that stuff of Jana’s. Like I owed it to her somehow. And when I finally got started, I found I wasn’t reading with the frightened disgust I’d felt in Third East. Somehow I could see now, that although a lot of it seemed offthe-show, it was real for Jana. And the people in it were her friends and family, people she loved and missed heaps. I nearly bawled when I read the bits about Fenna, her little brother. I half wished I was him. No wonder she freaked out when she thought he (I) was deliberately snubbing her. Life mustn’t have seemed worth living after that. The one person she was sure of, and he not only says 197
he doesn’t know her, he pisses off on her. We were both in the same boat I guess, both cut off from where we wanted to be. Neither of us knowing how to find safe passage. ‘So, what are your plans, laddie boy?’ Jock asked, when I went to the kiosk for a box of weetbix and a carton of milk later that morning. I shrugged. ‘You ought to think about going home. Nothing to keep you here now the oranges are finished. Take my word for it.’ ‘Why should I take your word for anything?’ I kidded him. ‘According to you I ought to be dead in the bottom of a cave about now.’ I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing I was just about ready to risk it. To see how Mum was, that was all. And maybe I’d check Jana out, tell her I was sorry I wasn’t Fenna. He seemed like an ace kid. Attaboy louse, one of the voices encouraged, tell that bum Jock where to get off. That riled me so much, that I turned back into the kiosk. ‘By the way, Jock,’ I said, very casually, ‘I’ve decided to take your advice and go home.’ ‘Well, knock me over with a feather,’ he spluttered, but he looked pleased. ‘Would’ve thought you were too pig-headed to take an old man’s advice. Wonders never cease.’ I left quickly before the old windbag drowned me in clichés. But I forced myself into a muttered, ‘Thanks for everything,’ to him before I hit the road. It won’t kill you, I told myself. I grit my teeth to get it out, but it was worth it. It made Jock’s day. Being a 198
boring old fart wasn’t a capital crime. His heart was in the right place, Mum would have said. Mum. My heart clenched every time I thought about her. I wanted her to tell me for sure that Gerra wasn’t finished, that she was alive somewhere out there. I could put up with never seeing her again, or being near her, if I could just be sure my brainless stupidity hadn’t wiped her out for good. In the end I fart-arsed around for another six weeks. I hitched to Port Weston and hung about there for a while. My money started to disappear so I took a job pumping petrol. Really I was just putting off making those last five hundred ks to Mordland. Every day when I knocked off I’d go down the docks and cruise about, checking out the fishing trawlers and fantasising about getting a job on a Norwegian cargo ship, taking off for Antarctica, Alaska, anywhere but Mordland. What seemed an okay plan at Freshwater Creek didn’t seem like such a good idea now. What the hell was I going to do back home anyway? Cruise into Debt Management and say, Hi, it’s me, I’m back, and take up being a clerk as if nothing had happened? Go back to being Mum’s darling son again? Spend the rest of my life listening to Dad’s bullshit?
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BRODIE It was weird being back. It was like I was from another planet. As if I’d been in suspended animation for six million years. Everything familiar but d i ff e rent. I didn’t stay at Mum and Dad’s of course. Besides, I was used to caravan parks now, to living physically close to other people, but keeping distance, never stepping over that invisible line. I checked into a park a few ks back from the headland. Not the popular one right down on the beach. It was a bit further to town, or to Mum’s and Dad’s, but I wanted to avoid bumping into anyone I knew. I rang Mum the night I got into town, and we talked for a while. I asked her not to tell Dad yet, I wanted to see her on her own first. Yes, of course, she agreed, she’d come over the next day. She said she thanked God for answering her prayers, and 200
bringing me safely back home again. Hearing her all breathless and tearful and happy on the phone shocked me. Made me realise some of what she’d been through. I was so desperate when I took off, I hadn’t thought what it’d be like for her. A bit the same as it was for me, losing Gerry. Even the guilt, I suppose. Loving someone can be a bummer. I was nervous about seeing her, but it was okay. We walked along the cliff path for hours, then went back to the van for a coffee. Finally, I got up the nerve to tell her some of the stuff I’d thought about at the caves. Strangely, she didn’t jump in and reassure me quite as enthusiastically as I’d expected. ‘Faith is not something you take on just to give yourself comfort, to avoid facing loss, you know,’ she said. ‘It has to come from something deeper than that. It’s true there are people who’d believe in anything, just to avoid looking life in the eye, and having to admit that evil or loss or death exists. That things happen that we can’t understand and don’t seem able to control. But such a faith is built on fear, and usually doesn’t last.’ It was about the longest speech I’d ever heard Mum give, but there was more to come. ‘Brodie, we are all capable of acting in ways we deeply regret. We all cause harm we can never undo.’ She looked so sad when she said that, I wondered what on earth she could have done in her life to cause anybody any harm. She’s one of those terminal do gooders, who’s nice to anyone, no matter how much of a nerd they are. ‘And I think the way faith grows,’ she said, ‘is 201
not in trying to find a way to undo what we’ve done. And not in spending the rest of our lives trying to make up for it, or giving ourselves a hard time. But, in accepting what has happened, and being glad that we have the choice to act well to others in the future. Simply out of gratitude to life.’ I knew what she meant about gratitude. And the way she was talking, all quiet and serious, told me that something happened in her life once, as terrible as losing Gerra was to me. And I think I understood what she was getting at. There was nothing now I could do to change what happened, but I could at least keep my promise to Jana, and not rat out on her just because she made me edgy. ‘You’re right,’ Mum agreed, when I told her that. She said I’d made the right decision in going away, that somehow I seemed stronger, steadier than before. I didn’t feel strong or steady but it was great to hear her say it. I put off the evil moment as long as I could, but in the end I had to front the old man. It was a disaster of course. We tried to be polite for Mum’s sake, but I was there only about five seconds b e f o re he started getting into me about having thrown away a perfectly good job, and where I’d be now if he’d done that. ‘In gaol, where I belong?’ I said. ‘That’s what you’re thinking, I suppose.’ It was history repeating itself, only this time there was no blue Mazda to jump into and scream off down the road, no girlfriend to pay with her life for my blind rage. 202
Why don’t you try to listen? Came that quiet voice then, the one I hadn’t heard since the caves. Just listen. So I tried. And what I heard when Dad was mouthing off was something so familiar it spun me right out. I still felt like smashing him, but finally I had to admit to myself what I really never wanted to know before: the guy was in pain. It was me, all over again. Just the same. Not saying what you really meant, spewing at someone else instead. He probably hated his job. He’d probably wanted to chuck it a million times but couldn’t, because of Mum, because of me. ‘Sorry Dad.’ The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. It wasn’t much, but in that second I really meant it, and he knew it. His mouth opened and shut like a fish. ‘I’ll be off then,’ I said into the awkward silence. Dad nodded. ‘Goodbye then, Son. Take care now.’ ‘Sure Dad. Catch you.’ Mum followed me to the door. ‘I’m proud of you, Brodie,’ she whispered, giving me a quick fierce hug. ‘And your father, you know, he’s got his sorrows like all of us, but he’s a good man. I hope you come to see that one day.’ I sneaked around for the next week, avoiding places where I might run into anybody I knew. It was only a matter of time, Mordland is not that big, but the longer I could put it off the better. I wondered where Atlas was living now. Mum’d k n o w. He was about the only person I felt like catching up with. I was restless, edgy, not sure 203
what to do next. Found myself time after time back at the place on the beach where I’d asked Gerra to marry me. But it was summer, everything was different. Mobs of kids digging sand castles, rushing in and out of the water, yelling to their mothers: Look at me, look at me. Sometimes it all stopped for a moment — freeze frame — and I’d feel the movement of the little waves at the tide line, like music inside my body, a bit like the song in the cave. And for a millisecond everything made sense, in some way that had no words to it. But the next minute I’d be staring into some pointless future that stretched into forever.
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HEATHER When I called in to see Jana next time, I was told she had a visitor. Brodie McPherson had turned up out of nowhere, just like that. They were huddled together at the end of the day ro o m talking. It was the day of the dress re h e a r s a l . Brodie looked up as I approached. ‘The vanishing patient returns,’ I quipped. He looked down at the floor, a sheepish expression on his face. He was thin and tanned, and seemed a lot older and even quieter than I’d remembered. I wondered where he’d been all this time. ‘I’m a visitor, not a patient now,’ he said, with a trace of embarrassment. There was an awkward silence. Finally I broke it. ‘I’ve come to take Jana to the dress rehearsal.’ He raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘Hurry up, if 205
you’re coming,’ I said, and ushering Jana out of the ward, left him to follow. It was quite funny really to watch the expression on his face during the rehearsal. Struck dumb, is the way Grandpa Breakwater would have put it. But what gave me a jolt was when the singer who played Fenna began the part where he chants the Song Cycles of the Heroines before the Clans in the Hytra. Brodie leaned forward in his chair, a stunned look on his face. A few bars into the chant his whole body seemed to relax and open up. His face went dreamy and his lips began to move, as though he were singing along silently. He seemed to know the words. Real life meets science fiction. I wasn’t sure that psychology, or I for that matter, could cope with it.
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BRODIE Spun out! I mean, this play was something else. It gave me goose bumps thinking about it. And you know something, when that dude was singing those temple chants, and the words started going through my head, I felt like I could have got up and sung them for him. Like I’d known this stuff forever. And I could see why Jana thought I was her kid brother. Wow! My brain went into overdrive. The psych freaked out too.
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HEATHER Perfectly simple according to Jana. That’s if you accepted her reality. A big ask. But I’d seen with my own eyes, Brodie McPherson mouthing the words of a chant in some language no one had ever heard of. Mindlink, Jana calls it. Telepathy? Strange. And even stranger when I questioned Brodie, and he told me with an odd look on his face that he’d quite enjoyed being Fenna, in fact he just might take on the identity for good. After all, he was adopted and no one really knew anything about his background, and it was true he used to sing in a choir when he was in primary school. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, or whether I’d have to include him in the case study as well!
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BRODIE I couldn’t help spinning a line to Heather, the psych. I felt a bit guilty, but it was worth it. She really thought she had two nut cases on her hands, instead of one. But it was weird, that Fenna stuff was so familiar to me. Yeah, I know Jana put it in my head. I suppose I must have been in some sort of trance, but the thing was, it felt good. Forever, there’d been the big deal about not knowing who I was, or where I fitted, and suddenly I was part of some great saga as if I’d been born to the part. Maybe I’d go along with it for a while.
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HEATHER The play was a big success. It was staged in the clinical lecture theatre, and attendance was by invitation. A lot of mental health and family services people came, as well as nurses and patients from Third East, the family and friends of the performers, and all the people who’d helped to bring it together. Mum and Dad came of course, and half the psych faculty members. Even Jeremy’s and Brodie’s parents were there. The feeling was fantastic. The clapping seemed to go on forever, and the cast took about a dozen curtain calls. Then Jeremy led Jana on stage, where she stood proudly, looking every inch the heroine who’d just been given her rightful homage. At the supper afterwards, even the Fre n c h s seemed mellow. And very surprised at how professional the performance was. Clever Jeremy, I 210
thought to myself. He’ll win them over on the grounds of art, so that eventually they’ll come to see his and Tristan’s relationship as some sort of artistic peccadillo. Jana was surrounded by a host of fawning attendants now that her status had been lifted from mere psychiatric patient to inspiration for such a successful performance. Something that would bring great kudos to the hospital and its OT program, as well as to its mental health team. And, never more than a few steps away, was Bro d i e McPherson, hovering about in a sort of proprietary way. I couldn’t help feeling anxious. I hoped he wasn’t entering into the fiction too wholeheartedly. People have been known to do strange things when they’re grieving. I hadn’t known he was adopted either, so his girlfriend’s death must have been a double blow. Just when he thought he’d finally got someone of his very own. Mind you, his parents seemed decent sort of people. I wondered if he’d told them about this Fenna stuff. Shouldn’t imagine so. I guess they would have met Jana on Third East and just come along for support. They looked the sort. Decent. Reliable. Worriers, too, I’ll bet. The father, particularly, looked anxious. Dad said the accident had happened after Brodie and his Dad had had a major row. That’d be hard for both of them to live with. Suddenly the implication of what I’d been thinking hit me. In hoping Brodie McPherson wouldn’t get too caught up in this fiction, I realised that in spite of the supposedly innovative way I’d approached my case study of Jana, all 211
along I’d unwittingly held the view of orthodox psychology. I’d assumed Jana’s story was symptomatic of a particular pathology. The realisation really shook me. So that when Prof Bremer and then Craigie-Fern himself came up to shake hands and congratulate me, not only on how painstakingly I’d documented Jana’s story, but on what a positive effect the process seemed to have had on Jana, I could hardly meet their eyes. I murmured something and slipped out into the foyer where drinks were being served. Felix was standing by the coffee dispenser. I started to push my way through the crowd. I badly needed to talk to him, to tell him about this realisation I’d just had, to hear his explanation, and perhaps receive a reassuring hug. I was about to call his name when I saw that he was with his wife. I stood watching them. Felix handed Marilyn her coffee, and they raised their polystyrene cups and smiled at each o t h e r. It was hard to breathe. They looked so married. They are, you twit, I told myself. And, I knew right then, that I’d never be more to Felix than what Dad and his friends called, ‘a bit on the side.’ He’d never stand with me in a public place, openly acknowledging our love. I’d only ever be his grotty secret. Oh, he cared about me, but it fed his ego too, to have me mooning over him, and I knew too that if I ever seriously challenged my place in his life, he’d drop me. Just like that. And, there’d always be another, and another, to take my place. Someday when I was strong enough, I might just take that risk, I told myself, turning back through the crowd to find Mum and Dad. 212
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BRODIE There was something she wanted to talk to me about, Jana told me that Thursday. I’d taken to dropping in regularly after college, every Friday. That’s right, college. I enrolled for a horticulture course. This was my second semester. I figured I’ve spent so much time picking stuff, I ought to start learning how to grow it. I couldn’t face the Tax Office, and I couldn’t sit round doing nothing, so I signed on for a one year course. Dad was pleased. Education was never wasted he reckoned. And, he’s always been such an ace g a rdener that now at least we had one or two things we could talk about, without getting into full-on aggro. Of course, he didn’t approve at first, and he had plenty to say about how he could teach the experts about growing plants, but that’s Dad. I guess I just have to face the fact that I 213
might always have a problem with him. But, in a way, it was easier to handle aggro feelings towards him than towards Mum, who’s just so kind that you felt like a nerd if you upset h e r. I wonder about people bringing up other people’s kids, I really do. But, being stuck in institutions or foster homes all your life would be worse, I guess. If my birth mother had been like Mum, she wouldn’t have had to give me away. God that stuff blows your brains out, trying to think about it. Everyone belongs somewhere, I suppose. Maybe it hasn’t even got anything to do with whether you know who you are. Even if you can’t see it, you’re in that place, no matter how much of a bad fit it might seem. So, you might as well get on with it, and cope the best way you can. The psych, Heather, told me that in Japan they get people in mental hospitals into gard e n i n g . They reckon it helps balance out the crazy stuff in their heads. Grounds them. Perhaps that’s why I chose horticulture. Plants don’t talk back. I didn’t shift from the caravan park for ages. I was still pretty spun out. I mean, I went over to Mum and Dad’s a bit, and saw Jana once a week. And every now and then Atlas and I’d go out for a skate or a game of pool, and once in a while I’d drop over and see Cheryl and the mob at Banksia Street. But I didn’t seem to fit back into my old life. I thought I might hit the road again, once my course was finished. Heather had mentioned that her uncle, who was a geologist up Berunga way, was looking for an assistant. 214
There was a feeling of waiting inside me, a feeling that there was something I had to do, to complete, some act of atonement for Gerra’s death. Mum was big on that sinner and atonement stuff, but she reckoned it was all up to God. I reckon you have to do something yourself. I don’t mean anything big and glorious, like I used to dream about when I was a kid, but it was like the scales were tipped sideways and they had to right themselves. I was scared I’d lose Gerra for good, because she was part of the voices and the pain of those last years, and now they’d started to fade maybe she’d fade out as well. I couldn’t stand that. Not that there was much of a chance. The psych, Heather, really reminded me of Gerry in lots of ways. The way she got on to Jana’s case, just like Gerra, and wouldn’t give up on her, even when I ratted out. Now, largely thanks to Heather, Jana was out of Third East and living in supported accommodation. I mean, I’d raved to Jana, what use was it being a heroine, if you were stuck in a psych ward. But it was Heather who’d put in the real time with her, got her to the point where she was able to leave the place. Mind you, Heather was nowhere near the operator Gerra was, she was much shyer and more uncertain, but she was an ace chick, for all that. I had a hunch that whatever it was I needed to do had something to do with Jana. Perhaps I’d have to take on being Fenna for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, I was a bit stunned when Jana told me she wanted to go back, and that she wanted me to help her do it. 215
‘Back where?’ I stuttered, but she just looked at me impatiently. She must return through the white wave, of course. The way she entered this TimeSpace Zone, back along the Forbidden Paths to find Ela and Jaenife, and quickly, before it was too late. Together they must return to the Clans, where she would tell the story of her Quest to the Controllers, and face the consequences. ‘And Fenna?’ I asked, nervously. Was she expecting me to go with her, and take part in some sort of suicide pact? She smiled at my thought. I blushed. I still hadn’t quite got used to her habit of reading my mind, or, as she put it, mind-linking. ‘You are feeling concern for the Fenna essence, that has twined itself through your being?’ Was that a fancy way of saying I’d been sucked into worrying about what happened to some dude who perhaps didn’t even exist? Except it was true, there was some weird connection. I’d felt it that first time, at Gerra’s party. It’d blown my brains. It still did. I found myself thinking all sorts of bizarre stuff. Like maybe the spirits of these Elams somehow could pass to people in our world, who weren’t firmly fixed in a particular race or tribe or family, or who were displaced. That it made them accessible in some way. It didn’t make sense, but neither did Gerra’s death, or singing rocks, or the way Atlas hung in there for me despite all the shit that’d gone down. It seems you’re just connected with some people, no matter what, and it’s those connections that hold things together when things get rough. 216
So, maybe, just maybe, it was okay that Gerra died, because she already knew all that. I wished it didn’t work that way. The fact that I wasn’t ready for her to go had to count for something.
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HEATHER I was a bit stunned, to put it mildly, when Brodie McPherson rang and told me what Jana had asked him to do. I questioned him anxiously. Surely she wasn’t asking us to help her suicide. No, he said, she was pretty shamefaced about that time she’d attempted to abandon her Quest prematurely, as she put it, but now she knew clearly that this part of her Quest was complete and it was time for her to return. It sounded reasonable, but how on earth could we help her to get back to a place that didn’t really exist, as far as we knew. ‘Beats me,’ he replied, ‘but I think I’d like a bit of help on this one. And she trusts you.’ I didn’t volunteer my services very eagerly. ‘Look, it’s not that I’m scared of taking the flak,’ he began. 218
I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Would you mind if we talked to Jeremy and Tristan about it? After all, we’re in this together.’ So, we arranged to meet the following evening at Al Fresco’s. ‘It’s a risk,’ Jeremy said, as we settled into a corner table with our cappuccinos. ‘We ar e n ’ t exactly sure that she isn’t going to fling herself from the top of the falls.’ ‘But we’ll be there to make sure she doesn’t,’ I said. ‘And she said through the white wave,’ Brodie interrupted. ‘But what does that mean, exactly?’ Tristan said. ‘Sort of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull act, walking t h rough cliff faces?’ It’s the question we’d all asked. And none of us had the answer. ‘It’s a risk,’ Jeremy said again, ‘and if something does happen to her, we’d be in deep shit.’ ‘Especially us three,’ Tristan said with a laugh, looking meaningfully at Jeremy and then at Brodie. ‘Marginalised members of society. They’d lock us up and throw away the key.’ That riled me a bit, the way they left me out. Assumed I was a goody two shoes. Hadn’t I taken the risk in the first place, by treating Jana’s story as though it were real? Brodie stuck up for me. ‘I think Heather’s got as much to lose as any of us,’ he said, ‘and she sure as hell put herself out on a limb for Jana.’ I wondered at the heat in his voice, then I remembered his girlfriend Geraldine’s part in the whole business, way back. I gave him an appreciat i v e 219
glance, and he blushed, under his tan. He was turning out to be a half-way decent guy, these days. So we took her to Ridgeway Falls, and unless you’d been there you would never have believed what happened. She literally walked straight into the waterfall, staggering a bit as the water came crashing down, and the next minute she’d disappeared. We waited, ten, fifteen minutes, before we started searching. There was no body, nothing. But we hadn’t really expected there to be. Just what we had expected, none of us could say. We just looked at one another stunned, and drove home silently.
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BRODIE A few months later there was an investigation. The group carer insisted. People aren’t supposed to just disappear. I was called back from Berunga, w h e re I was working with Eric Br e a k w a t e r, Heather’s uncle. We all had to answer some pretty dodgy questions, but as investigations go, it was cool. We were cleared of any criminal intent. As J e remy put it, Jana was a free agent. We had simply taken her to the waterfall, as she’d asked, and left her there, at her insistence. We could hardly have forced her to go back to Mordland, could we? We’d made sure she had food, money and a sleeping bag. And yes, as far as we knew, she was aware of what she was doing. We answered all their questions truthfully. We just didn’t fill in the bits they didn’t ask us. Jana had no connections with anyone except us 221
in Mordland, anyway. Or any other part of the country, it turned out. Just as no one had taken much notice when she first turned up, very few people seemed to care that she’d disappeared. For, whichever way you told it, she was gone. The kestrel had flown. The Quester had resumed her quest.
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HEATHER That just left me with the problem of how to write up the case notes.
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Journeys bring power and love back into you. If you can’t go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self. They are like shafts of light, always changing, and you change when you explore them. Rumi