Ignoring the hard ache in my bladder, I throw myself onto the closed plastic toilet seat and wrap my arms around myself, knees tucked in hard under my chin. The blue-green tiles beneath my toenails swim indistinctly in the ebb and flow of my salt tears, straight lines reforming into curves and back again. Please, please, let the nice old man not have heard me losing my head up here.
Perched there, I rock back and forth while the tears continue falling straight out of my eyes. It’s something habitual and comforting, the rocking. Mum told me I’ve always done it, since the fire. The rocking helped me get to sleep in the beginning, and I still do it after I climb into bed each night, or else the sleep won’t come. Just another thing that isn’t common knowledge about me. It’s what I do when I’m at home, and I can let it all hang out, and there’s no one to judge, because she never did. She accepted me and loved me and called me: the most precious thing in the whole world. Another sob escapes me then, harsh and monstrous.
I’m still crying noisily, steadily, when a deep voice, male, calls through the bathroom door, ‘Hello? Joanne?’
It’s like magic, the man’s voice. Instantly the tears, the rocking, the noise winding out of me, it all stops.
I am a single pent-up breath.
The guy tries the bathroom doorknob but I shot the bolt out of reflex, and the steam-warped door rocks in its frame, but doesn’t budge. I almost fall face-first off the top of the toilet, scrambling for the taps above the sink. I turn them both on, full force, to disguise the sound of my desperate breathing. But he is undeterred by the loud sound of running water. Rattle, rattle goes the door.
‘It’s Hugh,’ the voice calls out—male, posh, drunk, because it comes out:
Ish Hee-yoooooo.
‘You said I was supposed to come back and see you.’
Statement, not question; all the words slurring together. It takes me a beat extra than it should to work out what he’s saying. Was she expecting him today?
Trapped like an animal, I half-turn from the basin towards the ancient washing machine in the corner, as if I might somehow take shelter inside it, and hear someone else outside laugh, ‘Maybe she’s in the shower?’
The way my skin is prickling now actually hurts.
A third voice butts in. ‘Bet you’d like to see that, Charlie, you dog.’
Charlie, the dog, laughs and says, ‘We can wait. We can wait all night, right Hughey? Because you’re worth it. Don’t you wanna know how much?’
My eyes fly to their own bulging reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, scar flaming in the water-stained glass.
Men. Three. In my house.
Hugh, Charlie and a third one, whose confident sneer had made my skin crawl. What if they try to force their way in?
I hug myself, rocking, as the water runs and runs noisily down the plughole. For the second time today, I am outnumbered by strangers in my own home. It’s as if time and sound are magnified, made elastic, by my fear.
The doorknob rattles again and I almost tip over into the mirror, in horror. Leave me alone. My throat works at the words, but they do not come.
‘Now you bastards have got me here,’ the one called Hugh snarls imperiously, ‘what’s supposed to happen next? Jo-aaa-anne?’ he adds sharply, singsong. ‘Is everything o-kaaaay?’
Everything is not okay, it is not okay, but I pitch my voice higher than usual, like I’m doing a comedy version of my mother’s voice, and quaver, ‘Now’s not a good time, young man. Come back another day.’
Then I turn the water off, listening hard, fingers tangled in the spokes of the taps, which feel like the only things keeping me up.
‘She can’t be decent,’ sniggers the nameless one. ‘Maybe the hot, naked, psychic lady needs a hand?’ He doesn’t bother lowering his voice.
The male equivalent of giggles erupts outside—hor hor hor—and I feel my face flush right up to the hairline.
The door jumps as a fist is rammed into it. ‘I told you this was a waste of time, Rosso. She hasn’t even done it. I let her take my money, Jesus. Get my birth chart done to find out how my life’s going to “turn out”! It’s going to be a sterling life, and I don’t need a bullshit psychic to tell me that. Only morons believe in this stuff.’
Hugh, Charlie, Rosso.
Mum took this guy’s money?
He sounds like a born-to-rule arsehole. Mum usually gives shitheads like this a miss. She has a meter. She can just tell. How did she let this one through?
I can’t explain what happens next. The words just tumble out of me.
‘I’m a busy person, Hee-yoooooo,’ I roar, dizzy with fury and distress. ‘Leave your natal details on a piece of paper on the table on your way out and call in this time Monday. Alone. Leave the Greek chorus of wise guys at home. If you’re game.’
I’m so angry I’m not even rocking now, though the room seems to tilt in and out of focus at the edges.
‘Oh, I’m game,’ Hugh replies immediately through the door, ‘because, like I said, only morons believe in this stuff and nothing you can do has the power to change a single thing about me or my life. Later.’
He punches the door again, and I recoil into the pink enamel sink rim like the punch actually reached through the wood and landed on me. More shuffling and laughter, followed by the sound of something being shoved aside, or someone being shoved into someone else.
The heavy tock, tock of the bathroom clock tells me only minutes have passed, but it feels like hours that I stand there, waiting: for the creaking and snickering and shuffling outside to stop; for the sound of my own heartbeat to die out of my ears.
Why did I offer to do the guy’s chart? Mum’s never been able to get me to do one from start to finish, not even for a bit of pocket money, not even when I know how, like, backwards; because I refuse to be influenced, or to influence others, using some ‘science’ I don’t even truly believe in. And here I am promising to do the guy’s radix out of, what, anger?
But then I work out that some small, vicious part of me wants there to be bad news in Hugh’s stars, and for me to be the person who delivers it. I want it so much to be true, it is a feeling as fierce as pain. I will find something. I will twist him, and he will never be the same.
Feeling stupid, I pull open the medicine cabinet and grab the black-handled hair scissors off the first shelf. Cranking the door open an inch or two, I survey the narrow slice of hallway with the blades raised, letting out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding.
I push the door open more fully, and the creak it makes on the outward swing is like a chill breeze across my skin. It’s quiet now, and so very bright. The dim of the pendant light in the bathroom hasn’t prepared me to re-accept the light blazing down the length of the corridor, out of my room, Mum’s, everywhere. So much light. It’s like I released the sun in here. But all I can think is that I need to lock the front door; that I have to make it there first.
I’m moving down the hall before my feet know they’ve started. It is somehow like the light’s inside me, hot and unsettling, crowding out all conscious thought save the need to protect myself. How could I have been so dumb to leave the place wide open like that? I
find myself standing in the connecting doorway to the living room, just across from Mum’s room, and I can’t immediately process what I’m seeing as I look towards the kitchen. It’s all coming to me in pieces, stark and backlit.
A fallen reading lamp. On the floor.
A fan of papers, kicked out, like leaves, leading from the sofa towards the reading room, the kitchen bench beyond it.
Cushions every which way. Did I leave the place looking like this? Or did that pack of malicious pricks kick them around for good measure on their way out?
A man, bent so low over the meals table that the tip of his nose is almost touching it. A voice in my head says quite clearly and calmly: Leave him for now, he won’t hurt you, you know that.
My gaze slides right on past him—and he’s standing there plain as life, I mean I can see him, I can’t explain what I’m doing—and comes to rest on the long white envelope in the centre of the table with big, bold words and figures slashed across it.
What kind of wanker, I hear myself thinking, writes with a permanent marker?
And the conversation I’m having with myself goes exactly like this, as if circumstances have caused me, somehow, to split down the middle: Date of birth, time of birth, birthplace. It’d better all be there, just like I asked, the stupid shit.
But there’s a man!
Even his handwriting looks like an arsehole was responsible.
But there’s a man! The old man from downstairs.
He looks up suddenly and sees me, his face going as shocked and rigid as mine must be. He steps back, squinting, one hand rising up before him as if I am an apparition, and the light is a halo in his ring of fluffy, colourless hair.
I can’t really make out his face for the light when he says, ‘I warned her! I warned her this would happen!’
The words rain down on me like little pebbles, having no innate sense to them, only an irritant quality. Time and distance, all sensation, are magnified once more by my fear. Perhaps my heart stops; I don’t know.
I remember sliding to the ground, having enough sense not to fall on the scissors I am still loosely holding. But that’s all I remember.
There’s a telephone in my thoughts, ringing loudly. I follow the sound of it, like it’s a rope, until it brings me to the sharp realisation that I’m sprawled along my side across the floor, the greasy feel of the brown shag pile against my face.
But then I’m no longer on the floor, I’m in the air; lifted effortlessly by someone with hands that are slight, but hard with muscle. I’m laid across the couch and everything pings inwards, and I remember.
She’s gone. I’m alone.
No, I’m not. There’s a man. The old medicine man, from downstairs.
‘Avi-cen-na?’ he says, shaking me slightly. He sounds like he’s stepped out of a Chow Yun Fat movie.
He knows my name. That surprises me—because I’ve never introduced myself, never even talked to him—but I play dead for a bit longer, fighting the impulse to curl up in a ball and rock until the old man walks out in disgust, or dismay, unable to fathom what I could possibly be doing. Once, when I was nine and sleeping over at a friend’s house, someone caught me doing it and that was pretty much the end of sleeping over. People think you’re mad, you see, and they think that madness is catching.
The telephone stops then starts up again, loud and jarring, and the old man snaps, ‘I know you are awake. Aren’t you going to answer it?’
I ignore that, too, eyes jammed resolutely shut to indicate: I do not want your help; I do not need you here; I will ‘come to’ when you have gone. The man makes a hunh kind of noise and walks away, and I feel myself start to relax as he crosses the room.
Then he actually answers my phone. My eyelids spring open as he says calmly, ‘Avicenna’s phone, Boon speaking.’
‘What are you doing?’ I say, appalled, scrambling upright, as Boon adds, ‘Okay, okay, uh huh, she’s home, no problem.’
He gently replaces the receiver, looking at me across the length of the apartment, his head slightly tilted.
‘You’ve got no right!’ I snarl.
He shrugs. ‘It could have been your mother.’
That stops me like a bullet.
‘I saw some men leaving your apartment,’ the old man says, expression softening. ‘Naturally, I was worried. You should really be locking your door. I told your mother, when she insisted on moving back here, that the city is a lot crazier than when she lived here with your father.’
I feel the muscles of my face sliding into shock. He knew both of them?
‘You have his eyes,’ the man adds, as if he can read my mind. ‘Oh, and your school friend, Simon Thorn—that was him on the phone. He wants his book back. He says he’s coming over now to collect it.’
Then the old man’s gone, and it’s all I can do to make it to the toilet in time.
5
Basic Premise #1: Simon Thorn knows where I live.
If Vicki Mouglalis was the one who told him my address, I will kill her myself using some fiendishly diabolical and highly complex methodology involving pulleys, notwithstanding that she is my closest friend (and that’s not saying much).
Basic Premise #2: Simon Thorn cannot come up here and see how I live.
I can imagine his lips twisting hatefully as he says to his second-in-commands Buddy Sadiq and Glenn Tippett on his way over: Getting a glimpse of the Frankencrowe in her native habitat? Priceless.
The things you see, you can never unsee. He’s not allowed that much power over me. I’ve got to catch him on the street, before he even sets foot on the stairs.
Bolting out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, I look for my backpack and that stupid Compendium of Classic English Poetry that I was forced to borrow off him to write my half of the talk because I was too cheap to source myself a copy. I remember the collective gasp that had gone up when Mrs Dalgeish allocated talk partners midway through first term. I’d only been there a few weeks, but already I knew who was safe, who wasn’t.
‘But it’s worth ten per cent of our final mark!’ Simon had protested, skin pale with fury, refusing to look me in the eye.
‘Maybe you got lucky,’ Adam Carney had snorted from behind, ‘because she’s going to carry your sorry arse over the line, Thorny. She’s got the Tichborne covered; ask anyone. I’ll take her if you don’t want her.’
Lots of people had joined in the haggling, while I burned and burned at my desk, until Dalgeish had rolled her eyes under her unnaturally black Jazz-Age bob and matching eyebrows and put a stop to it. Cornered, Simon’s gaze had snapped to mine with an All right, bring it kind of look which had made me so mad I had asked him for his stupid book in front of everyone, and he’d had to hand it over.
I tip everything in my daypack onto the carpet and I’m looking at a coin purse, a plastic zip-lock bag full of panty liners and a squashed banana that’s ninety-nine per cent black. None of which remotely compute when taken in combination. Where is everything?
While I’m staring down at the banana, whose off-white insides have started leaking out through the broken skin like pus, I’m frantically jiggling on the spot. Tea
ring off flannelette every-which-way and pulling on jeans, a yellow turtleneck and a shapeless fleecy navy hoodie with kangaroo pockets I’m hoping will convey just the right amount of disdain for Simon Thorn, eternal champion of the free-market system and school captain of the biggest boatload of dysfunctional so-called high-school geniuses in Melbourne.
Every girl nerd and polysexual at Collegiate High—a name that says it all, because every day at Collegiate High is exactly that!—has a metaphorical hard-on for Simon Thorn, who like some mystical Indian shaman goes by many names: The Thornster; Greased Lightning; Simo; Lucky-as-fuck.
He’s the man most likely to steal your girlfriend and charge you for the privilege, via some complex betting/ Ponzi scheme he’s come up with. I can imagine the swinging, cashed-up household he hails from: half an acre on The Avenue in Parkville, with a louche barrister father who doesn’t believe in having to pay a cent for education, and a fruitarian artist mother who used to be a neurosurgeon.
Can Simon Thorn argue. He has a mouth like a sub-artillery machine gun and looks like one of those ugly-beautiful French boys: the kind with interesting bony faces and long, off-kilter noses who model kilts and combat boots on the runway. All grey-green eyes, nuclear-winter pale skin, straight dark brows and slicked-down, side-parted short hair that’s long on top. Whatever the weather—maybe because he’s trying to prove he’s really one of us, one of the proles—he wears worn-looking jeans with beaten-up leather workboots and a rotating handful of faded, button-front Henleys that show off his boxer’s shoulders and broad-spectrum pectorals to perfection.
We’re all scholarship kids, see, every single one of us. Get past the fiendish entrance exam and show proof you live within two kilometres of the place—established for the offspring of the inner-city working class by some 19th century sadist—and you’re in. There’s no uniform, few rules. You don’t have to possess basic levels of personal hygiene or even a loose idea of how the social contract is supposed to work. Based on the way people eat at The Caf, the entire student body has never been taught how to hold a fork properly and can’t afford three square meals a day.